by hilzoy
Having been busy, I haven’t written about the firing of the eight prosecutors before now. (Josh Marshall has, and if you haven’t been reading his reporting on it, you should. And TPMMuckraker has helpfully collected all its posts on this story here.) But it’s one more of those stories that ought to be shocking, but isn’t even surprising anymore. (The one truly surprising thing is that I found myself feeling nostalgic for John Ashcroft, of all people. One of the fired prosecutors, quoted in the NYT: “He said he had been guided by a personal admonition from former Attorney General John Ashcroft shortly after he was appointed in 2001. “He took me into his office and said, ‘David, when you come here, you’ve got to stay out of politics.’ ”)
The idea that prosecutors — who have the power to decide whose life gets to be made hell on earth by being subjected to an investigation, and whose does not — are being leaned on by Congresspeople, political operatives, and the like to prosecute Democrats is just wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The latest twist:
“Presidential advisor Karl Rove and at least one other member of the White House political team were urged by the New Mexico Republican party chairman to fire the state’s U.S. attorney because of dissatisfaction with his job performance including his failure to indict Democrats in a voter fraud investigation in the battleground election state.
In an interview Saturday with McClatchy Newspapers, Chairman Allen Weh said he complained in 2005 about then-U.S. Attorney David Iglesias to a White House liaison who worked for Rove and asked that he be removed. Weh said he followed up with Rove personally in late 2006 during a visit to the White House. (…)
Weh recalled asking Rove at a White House holiday event in December: “Is anything ever going to happen to that guy?” What Weh didn’t know was that the firings of Iglesias and the others had already been approved.
Weh said Rove told him: “`He’s gone.’ I probably said something close to `Hallelujah.'””
Josh Marshall notes one big unanswered question: given that other prosecutors were subjected to pressure to prosecute Democrats, and apparently fired for not doing so, was Carol Lam fired because of her investigations of Republicans?
“Given what we know about New Mexico and Washington state, it simply defies credulity to believe that Lam — in the midst of an historic corruption investigation touching the CIA, the White House and major Republican appropriators on Capitol Hill — got canned because she wasn’t prosecuting enough immigration cases. Was it the cover? Sure. The reason? Please.
I’m not sure Lam would have been canned simply for prosecuting Cunningham. His corruption was so wild and cartoonish that even a crew with as little respect for the rule of law would have realized the impossibility of not prosecuting him. But she didn’t stop there. She took her investigation deep into congressional appropriations process — kicking off a continuing probe into the dealings of former Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis. She also followed the trail into the heart of the Bush CIA. Those two stories are like mats of loose threads. That’s where the story lies. “
(The administration claims Lam was fired because she didn’t prosecute immigration cases aggressively enough, though apparently they didn’t think so a few months before (pdf).)
Paul Krugman raises another crucial point:
“The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn’t go along with the Bush administration’s politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.
Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny.”
(The study is available here.)
He also brings up the investigation of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), which happened shortly before the election and has mysteriously vanished since:
“For those of us living in the Garden State, the growing scandal over the firing of federal prosecutors immediately brought to mind the subpoenas that Chris Christie, the former Bush “Pioneer” who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, issued two months before the 2006 election — and the way news of the subpoenas was quickly leaked to local news media.
The subpoenas were issued in connection with allegations of corruption on the part of Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who seemed to be facing a close race at the time. Those allegations appeared, on their face, to be convoluted and unconvincing, and Mr. Menendez claimed that both the investigation and the leaks were politically motivated.
Mr. Christie’s actions might have been all aboveboard. But given what we’ve learned about the pressure placed on federal prosecutors to pursue dubious investigations of Democrats, Mr. Menendez’s claims of persecution now seem quite plausible.
In fact, it’s becoming clear that the politicization of the Justice Department was a key component of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a permanent Republican lock on power. Bear in mind that if Mr. Menendez had lost, the G.O.P. would still control the Senate.”
It is, unfortunately, standard practice for Presidents to give things like Ambassadorships to their political supporters. It is not, and should never be, standard practice for them to turn the full punitive powers of the Federal government on their opponents. This is a serious scandal, and I hope it is investigated for all it’s worth.
And here I thought if I left the country for two weeks things would be all better when I got back. Bummer.
“It is not, and should never be, standard practice for them to turn the full punitive powers of the Federal government on their opponents.”
I feel so nostalgic for 1974.
Federal Prosecutors should have exceptionally high ethical and professional standards. We in this “scandal” should one be demonstrated, are not merely talking about a dozen high Bush administration officials but dozens, perhaps hundreds of Republicans who violated their oaths, used their offices for a partisan purpose, and very likely broke the law. The individual prosecutors should not be allowed to claim political or career as an excuse for abusing their powers. Supposedly among the best educated, trained, and most honorable Republicans. Whatever sampling errors might occur in forming a general rule here should be favorable to the larger group.
Yet here we are. For the record, I am certainly not saying that all, each and every single Republican is corrupt, conscienceless, and unethical. I don’t believe that to be true. Not every single one.
I feel so nostalgic for 1974.
The true measure of the Bush Administration is that Nixon is starting to look pretty dang good right about now…
“Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power.”
Would it have been so hard for them to have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officals by U.S. attorneys since the Clinton administration came into power? And gone on to look at the subsequent conviction rate?
They seem not to have taken seriously the hypothesis that Democrats are just systematically more corrupt than Republicans. And because they didn’t, they seem not to have collected any of the data which would be needed to disprove that alternate explaination for the disparity in investigations.
A real mistake, I must say, if you’re trying to convince anybody besides Democrats that there’s a problem here. And a glaring omission from even a disinterested standpoint. It’s just flat out bad social science here, folks.
BTW, I should say before the screaming starts that I’m quite open to the possiblity that the Bush administration is using US attorneys to mount a corrupt attack on the Democratic party. But this study is a pretty good example of how NOT to go about proving it.
Brett: They seem not to have taken seriously the hypothesis that Democrats are just systematically more corrupt than Republicans
If that hypothesis were true, their database should show, steadily, since January 2001, a consistent and unfluctuating difference between Democratic and Republican politicans. Actually, given that in 2001 no Republican politicians had yet been prosecuted for accepting bribes from Jack Abramoff, and the 37 must include all of the Republicans implicated in the Abramoff scandal, in 2001 the difference ought to have been even greater than the total difference today in 2007.
But, if the greater number of Democratic politicians investigated is due to political bias on the part of the Bush administration, the figures for 2001 ought to have been just about level, but we ought to see an increase as the Bush administration begins to make its political influence on federal attorneys felt.
67, not 37. 🙁
The idea that
prosecutorsIRS auditors — who have the power to decide whose life gets to be made hell on earth by being subjected to an investigation, and whose does not –Sorry. Couldn’t resist.
Snark aside, yeah, Tricky Dick would feel right at home in this administration.
You’re not making a lot of sense. Assume, for the sake of argument, that the Clinton administration was artifically suppressing investigations of Democratic politicians. The changeover of attorneys when a new President takes office isn’t instantaneous, and there is bound to be a good deal of lag before the new policies take full effect even after the changeover is complete.
So, we would expect a delay of some significant duration, followed by the ratio gradually ramping up to a new equilibrium. Not a steady equilibrium, of course, since one at least presumes that being in the minority gives one less opportunity for corruption.
But, of course, that transition period is a rather poor source of data concerning Clinton era prosecutorial policies. And you really need conviction rates to determine if the choice of targets is politically biased, (And to distinguish between going after innocent Democrats, from not going after guilty Republicans, two versions of the alternate hypothesis.)
No, I must maintain that they failed to collect data which was obviously needed to prove their case. Presumable because they didn’t think any alternate explaination deserved to even be debunked. Bad science.
Each and every US Attorney is a political appointee. The fact that the provision allowing the appointments without Senate approval is the real scandal here. For all the purported illegal acts of the administration,this series of firings were perfectly legal.
What bothers me most about this is that the Senate,and I mean none of the Democrats in this case,read a piece of legislation closely enough to have noticed the last minute addition. None of the staffs,none of the aides,nobody.
How many other bills are being voted on by both sides with provisions so damaging to the role of the Senate,the supposedly more deliberative body.
The US Attorneys are admonished perhaps to be above the political fray,but that’s a seldom achieved ideal. The nature of the job is to cut deals,even in the midst of prosecutions. They have budget and performance criteria on which they are judged.
And, remember, I AM open to the possiblity that they’re right. I just think they went about proving their case in a bad way.
Brett, I think you’re wrong to be thinking in terms of Bush and Clinton. I think it’s Ashcroft and Gonzales.
I don’t like John Ashcroft. But he did demonstrate, more than once, that he was an honest Attorney General: he recused himself from the Plame investigation, for example. If we assume that, under Ashcroft, federal attorneys were immune from political interference, but not under Alberto Gonzales, then the database beginning from January 2001 makes sense: Ashcroft’s term as Attorney General provides a baseline for the relative numbers of Democratic and Republican politicians being investigated, prosecuted, and convicted – and should then show a difference after Alberto Gonzales was appointed.
Makes sense if they were trying to compare Ashcroft to Gonzales. (And I agree that Gonzales comes off rather poorly in such a comparison.) Of course, that’s not what they said they were trying to compare. In fact, they say,
“The current Bush Republican Administration appears to be the first to have engaged in political profiling.”
My question, quite simply, is how can they make that case if they didn’t collect data on other administrations?
They can’t. They didn’t collect the data necessary to prove that this is political profiling rather than a result of differential corruption, and they didn’t collect the data to prove that the Bush administration is different in this regard.
You can’t make a statement about A compared to B if you only look at B. It’s as simple as that.
And, BTW, 8 to 1? Good lord, if it were 2 to 1, I might be more inclined to buy the theory that it was just an excess of Democratic corruption. But 8 to 1? Ought to be pathetically simple to prove that it’s political bias, once they stop assuming a priori that any difference has to be “profiling”, and actually try to round up proof.
Brett: “The current Bush Republican Administration appears to be the first to have engaged in political profiling.”
But that would be perfectly true whether or not they were assuming that the corruption began with Ashcroft or with Gonzales.
My question, quite simply, is how can they make that case if they didn’t collect data on other administrations?
Well, is it your contention that under the Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan, and Carter administrations federal attorneys were leaned on to investigate along party lines/fired when they didn’t cooperate? If that is your contention, this all happened long enough ago that there should be a fair number of those federal attorneys now able to come forward and say “Hey, we wanted to prosecute corrupt Democratic politicians, but Clinton made clear what would happen to an attorney who tried!”
It does make sense to look at data from previous administrations, too. But if (as I suspect) their hypothesis is that the rot began when Gonzales was appointed, data going back only to the beginning of Ashcroft’s appointment as Attorney General should suffice.
Gonzales makes me wonder if the Attorney General should actually be a political appointee. (Of course, the Democrats could have and should have filibustered the nomination).
Ought to be pathetically simple to prove that it’s political bias, once they stop assuming a priori that any difference has to be “profiling”, and actually try to round up proof.
Well, you do seem yourself to be assuming a priori that the difference has to be way more Democratic corruption and Clinton’s actively protecting corrupt local Democratic politicians from prosecution.
But I do see your point about it being useful to include data in the database back to March 1993. I don’t know why they didn’t do that, but I wouldn’t trust a news report to make clear scientific methodology – that kind of thing is frequently either not reported accurately because the reporter didn’t understand it, or not reported at all because the newspaper thinks their reader won’t understand it. There may be a good methodological reason why their database begins in 2001, and without a link to the scientists’ own account of why they picked the boundaries they did, I wouldn’t assume it was wrong.
It would suffice to prove that there was something wrong with Gonzales, which I am not inclined to dispute. But, I repeat, that was not their thesis. I’m simply observing that they didn’t collect the data needed to prove the thesis they actually advanced.
FWIW, I agree with Brett on this one. If those numbers exist, I’d like to see them. Just think, if the historical numbers show what most of us suspect they show, what a conclusive case they would make.
So we have a country of regional and global geopolitical significance, flouting international norms, replacing the rule of law in matters of personal concern to the ruling cabal with purely personal allegiance, thoroughly corrupt, operating in deep secrecy to hide details of official activity from internal and external critics, in possession of nuclear weapons and unwilling to support multilateral efforts at nonproliferation beyond a minimum of lip service, with a recent history of violent warmaking and active hostility to measures aimed at protecting civilians, rebuilding infrastructure, or even simply finding out what the costs of conflict have been.
When will Charles be calling for war against the Washington junta?
Brett, if their thesis was that the Bush administration was the first to engage in political profiling, then data comparing Gonzales with Ashcroft would still work to prove that the Bush administration did.
But, as cw says, I don’t disagree that more information on patterns of prosecution under previous attorney generals would also be useful. Though if the data showed reasonable equality from 2001 onwards (which would include, as you pointed out, legacy data from the Clinton administration), and took a spike upwards under Gonzales, I’d say that proves enough.
The study is an indicator, but proves nothing by itself. I agree with Brett that information on the outcomes of these cases are relevant, and I would welcome a similar study for the previous few administrations.
However, investigations by themselves can be an intrusive, intensive form of harassment, so I think the 8:1 ratio tells us something.
But I find far more persuasive what professionals in the justice system have understood for decades about the U.S. Attorney position: Sure, it’s a political appointment, but there is a long tradition that appointees fill out the entire term of the administration that appointed them except for cases of real malfeasance or truly inadequate performance.
I would welcome information on any U.S. attorneys who have been relieved of their duties for whatever reason, over the course of the last six administrations. Placed in that context, I think the events of 2006 will speak for themselves.
It’s very rare but I side with Mr.Bellmore here. My personal hypothesis would be that Democrats are not inherently more corrupt but on a general base more likely to be forced to pay for it, i.e. I’d suspect that (on the federal level) Democrats would have moderately higher conviction rates but far below those we have here. Should be easy to check.
What could also be interesting is the relation of investigations to actual convictions. Without looking at the data I would suspect that investigations under the current Bush have increased more than the convictions, hinting at an abuse of the system for harassment.
Concerning Ascroft vs. Gonzales, IMO the former is a loony but true to his convictions but the latter would fit in perfectly with any authoritarian/totalitarian system independent of political shade.
Nell I would welcome information on any U.S. attorneys who have been relieved of their duties for whatever reason, over the course of the last six administrations.
There’s a list on wikipedia, which doesn’t exactly seem to bear you out, though I haven’t clicked on any of the names. Going back 40 years to Lyndon Johnson, there’s been 15 Attorneys General, and the shortest period of tenure is Elliot L. Richardson (Nixon: May 25, 1973 – October 20, 1973). Most of them seem to have held the post for two or three years. Most Presidents seem to have had at least two, including Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. (Nixon had four.) Clinton is the only one who appointed an attorney general in 1993 and she stayed in the post for 8 years: Janet Reno is an exception, not a rule.
With regard to Elliot L. Richardson: It shows my ignorance of recent American history. I had never heard of the Saturday Night Massacre. Wow, those were days. How Bush has learned from Nixon.
These prosecutors forgot that all the organs of the State, including the office of People’s Attorney, are tasked with protecting and promoting the unique role of the Party as the Vanguard of the Revolution.
Sailing the seas depends on the Helmsman. Doubtless Comrade Rove correctly detected a lack of committment to the Party and the Helmsman in Comrades Lam, McKay Iglesias, et al, as evidenced by their failure to complete work norms.
They was fired for failing to show in their work correct orientation towards the greater struggle, and the correct role of legal cadres within that struggle.
Y’all got a problem with that?
Jes: Nell is interested in a tally of fired/replaced US Attorneys, I think, not Attorneys General. USAs are sort of regional legal deputies. AsG are the lone Alberto Gonzaleses at the top.
Model62: My bad: I misunderstood. Still, I’m not sorry to have happened to look up the Saturday Night Massacre story…
Disagree wildly. When we have tanks on the streets of Washington, round-ups of tens of thousands of people who are then held in RFK Stadium, FBI agents systematically assassinating black militants, proven wiretapping and break-ins on political enemies of the Administration, including Democratic National Committee headquarters and Howard Dean, massive secret bombing of Iran and Syria by B-52s for months, as well as secret invasions of these countries by thousands of U.S. troops, massacres of hundreds of Iraqi women and children at a time, and American war protestors being randomly shot down in groups at protests by the National Guard, on more than one college campus at a time, get back to me about this.
Kids.
OCSteve: “Snark aside, yeah, Tricky Dick would feel right at home in this administration.”
Much better.
Katherine: “Gonzales makes me wonder if the Attorney General should actually be a political appointee.”
Not exactly a new question in the republic, and not starting with Bobby Kennedy. Previously “solved” at various times by various customs and constraints, as well as, relatively recently, until even more relatively recently, by the “independent counsel” law that Congress let lapse during the Clinton era, after bi-partisan dissatisfaction. I thought that was the wrong response then, and I haven’t changed my mind.
On the other hand, I’d advise looking back closely at the events of the Andrew Johnson Administration before further discussing making any member of the Cabinet not-a-political appointee, whatever that means, exactly.
“I had never heard of the Saturday Night Massacre.”
Goodness. (Not faulting you; there’s no reason you should be expert in the affairs of a foreign country over thirty years ago; but it should leave you lots of fascinating stuff to learn about Watergate, and investigating an evil President and his law-breaking henchmen, as well as how the U.S. finally got out of a lost war.)
In case you didn’t notice, by the way, the man Nixon finally got to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox was Associate Attorney General (the third-ranking Department of Justice official) Robert H. Bork, who was later the darling jurist of the Reagan era, and who famously was not confirmed to be on the Supreme Court, another of the Great Grievances ever since of conservatives in the U.S.
The only subsequent White House Press Secretary who has ever come remotely as close to being a worm as Ron Ziegler, though, was Ari Fleischer; Tony Snow is a lot more professional (and competent), I’d have to grant. No “that statement is no longer operative” from him.
And one thing I’ll grant to Cheney is that he’s lots brighter than Spiro Agnew ever was. More dangerous, probably, but, then, Agnew never had any real power; he was just an attack dog — closer to having Rush Limbaugh as Veep, but with the job of only giving speeches attacking liberals and the nattering nabobs of negativity in the press.
Sorry, Bork was Solicitor General; momentary mindo to confuse him with Associate AG.
Bush would’ve been better off pulling a Clinton and firing them all right after he was elected. Such an act would have killed his “uniter, not a divider” rhetoric at the time, but at least it would’ve been better than this.
“Bush would’ve been better off pulling a Clinton and firing them all right after he was elected.”
?
The 8 U.S. attorneys he’s fired were ones he (like all other U.S. Attorneys) appointed; he couldn’t fire them right after he was elected, because he hadn’t appointed them yet.
I’m probably misunderstanding you in some simple way.
What do you mean by “pulling a Clinton,” incidentally, Charles? Are you saying that Bill Clinton did something unusual as regards U.S. Attorneys when he was first elected? If so, what? Or what?
I’m comparing the system in European countries where prosecutors are independent positions more like judges. South Africa too, I think.
The combination of not politically independent federal prosecutors, and the lack of restriction on the classification power, means that if the administration doesn’t want to uphold the rule of law, the only real remedy is impeachment. Which is also not feasible without a huge majority in Congress.
I don’t know. I wish I lived in a country with a different structured government, these days. I don’t think ours works so well anymore.
Can you name one that does, Katherine? (No snark intended. I am genuinely curious, as the roster of governments worldwide does not fill this observer with confidence.)
“I’m comparing the system in European countries where prosecutors are independent positions more like judges. South Africa too, I think.”
So you’re saying you don’t just want to someone better insulate the A-G from political considerations (certainly a legitimate notion, with a number of possibilities, both new and old), you want to switch to an entirely different form of justice system and government. Well, okay, but I’m not sure that leaves us much to discuss until you put forth your suggested new Constitutional changes. 🙂
Of course, traditionally U.S. Attorneys are supposed to have a degree of independence, never clearly defined or outlined, but helped by the tradition that one couldn’t be nominated and confirmed without the ok, if not being the direct nominee, of the senior Senator of the state, as well as, of course, the provision that was eliminated via the Patriot Act, which started this whole mishegos, which was that any temporary appointments would be made by a federal judge, until a new nominee was put forward to be confirmed by the Senate.
It was this whole trick of elminating that, and allowing the President to nominate “temporary” U.S. Attorneys indefinitely — i.e., “permanently” (until the end of the President’s term) — without Senate confirmation, that got us into this; the system didn’t seem to be extraordinarily distorted prior to that, so I’m unclear why it’s intolerable to go back to the pre-Patriot Act status quo ante.
The Napoleanic approach to justice systems is hardly lacking for problems, itself, after all. If you thought (as I and many did) that Ken Starr was out of control, just wait until you create a system with hundreds of Ken Starrs that can be appointed by Republicans, who can’t be removed by a Democratic President. This will be a great improvement?
I’m not talking about the Patriot Act provisions. I’m talking about the government committing well documented war crimes and the political appointees from the Eastern District of Virginia who was assigned to investigate failing to bring a single indictment, the Office of Legal Counsel utterly betraying its obligations, etc. etc.
I suppose there’s no system of gov’t that’s actually immune to corruption by the party in power and the party out of power not giving a damn. But I don’t think ours is all it’s cracked up to be.
I will not dispute that, Katherine. I am personally inclined towards breaking the U.S. into 4-5 smaller republics, each of which can determine its own structure. If nothing else, such a breakup would reduce the hyperpower problem. But I suspect that suggestion wouldn’t go over well.
“Can you name one that [have a government that works well] does, Katherine?”
Iceland has always seemed interesting. Of course, the situation of a tiny country, with an ethnically homogenous people, is quite different from that of one that is neither.
But also Finland. Estonia seems to be doing very well in recent years. Neither do many people seem to be fleeing from Switzerland, nor Sweden, nor the other Scandanavian countries.
But relatively speaking, I don’t think either the U.S., or much of Europe, is really all that dysfunctional, compared to either much of the rest of the world, or historically (neither is Australia or New Zealand collapsing; to be more controversial, one could make a good case for the considerable increases of well-being China has been bringing to its population for the past thirty years, despite a lack of political freedom).
So I’d ask “works well” compared to what?
“Brett, if their thesis was that the Bush administration was the first to engage in political profiling, then data comparing Gonzales with Ashcroft would still work to prove that the Bush administration did.”
Nope. Fails on two points.
First, without looking at other administrations, they can’t establish that Bush was the first.
Second, without assuming a priori that Democrats and Republicans are equally corrupt, the differential they found does not establish political profiling.
It’s, of course, a question of longstanding disagreement between the left and right, whether the existance of differential impact, divorced from any other evidence, is proof of discrimination. I fall firmly on the right side of that divide.
The 8 to 1 ratio is a lot higher than I find plausible, but I don’t think my intuitions trump evidence. Now, if the conviction rate for Democrats turns out to be substantially lower than for Republicans, THAT would cinch it in my mind.
“But I don’t think ours is all it’s cracked up to be.”
What is?
G’kar: “I am personally inclined towards breaking the U.S. into 4-5 smaller republics, each of which can determine its own structure. If nothing else, such a breakup would reduce the hyperpower problem. But I suspect that suggestion wouldn’t go over well.”
I’d say that if that was a good idea, we should have just skipped the Civil War, and gone directly to that; it would have saved a great deal of trouble to get to the same result.
It certainly would have made for a different 20th Century, though.
Separation of powers doesn’t work so well when the legislature would just as soon abdicate. I think I’d rather a parliamentary system.
Thanks, Gary. Again, I would be grateful for a pointer to information about any U.S. Attorneys who have been removed from their jobs.
Charles is just passing along the ignorant smear that is the official spin on this corruption of the justice system.
Every new administration appoints new U.S. Attorneys. They are political appointees. Until this regime, those USA’s were left in place (absent individual and rare cases of malfeasance or dereliction) for the duration of the administration’s term.
I may be wrong about this, but it is what I understood about USAs long before this scandal, and what the forced-out USAs believed as well. Read or view their testimony: they were gobsmacked when the call came telling them they were gone.
If anyone has counter-examples, please present them.
I mean, the mechanism did exist to prevent Gonzales and Ashcroft from being confirmed–the solution may simply be that “the President gets the cabinet he wants” rule cannot apply to the Attorney General; that should be more like a Supreme Court confirmation.
I still haven’t got over the El-Masri decision, I think.
“Separation of powers doesn’t work so well when the legislature would just as soon abdicate. I think I’d rather a parliamentary system.”
How would that work better when the legislature (parliament) would just as soon advocate?
If people are willing, as a dominant group, to not live up to their responsibilities, I’m quite doubtful that restructuring will alone provide a solution.
I’m inclined to think political culture is ultimately more important, because with a will to change, much can be done to change structure (if necessary, in a revolutionary way, a thought much countenanced by our founding fathers), but if the polity or political leadership are overwhelmingly dispirited or apathetic or cowed, the structure really doesn’t matter much.
I’m inclined to always be a bit suspicious of possible their-grass-is-greener syndrome, as a rule, as well. I really can’t say that I’ve observed the splendid parliamentary system of, say, Italy, or Israel, to be a distinct inherent improvement over our system, though YMMV.
“How would that work better when the legislature (parliament) would just as soon advocate?”
Whoops: “abdicate,” not “advocate,” of course.
Yes, “Clinton fired everyone, too!” is a RW talking point that needs to be shot down.
When a new Administration starts, all the political appointees from the previous Administration are fired. It’s standard procedure, so the new Administration can install its own political appointees. There’s nothing stopping the new Administration from simply reapppointing any or all of the old group, and there’s nothing stopping the new Administration from replacing them all, either.
What’s different about this is that all of the USA’s were already Bush’s political appointees; and that all seem to have been fired because they were insufficiently sensitive to the campaign needs of Republican candidates, or for uncovering too much Republican corruption, or to make room for Bush-Rove cronies.
Neatly, if deceptively, dismissed, Gary. There is no small difference between the U.S. breaking up over slavery and the Confederacy continuing slavery for many more decades and a breakup of a United States where people have very different dreams and desires for what they would like their country to be.
The biggest flaw in the ointment, as I see it, is that the major schism in the U.S. today is between the country and the cities (see here, although it is for the 2000 election), so there are major practical flaws with the idea because it is difficult to break up into smaller nations along logical geographic lines without recreating the city-country schism in miniature in each new nation.
Conversely, the mere act of having to determine new government systems for each nation might at least allow some of the new states to begin again with power devolved to the lowest level. Power would accrete upwards over time, but we might get another century or so of limited federal government before that time came.
It won’t happen without bloodshed, sadly, but I’m not certain that day will not arrive eventually nonetheless as the federal government grows stronger. Sooner or later, the federal government will make a decision people are willing to fight over, and it is difficult to predict what might happen when that day arrives.
Structual reform that would put members of Congress more closely in touch with the wishes of those they represent: public financing (or any other change to campaign financing that removes the built-in instinct of members to pay more attention to PACs than to constituents).
First, without looking at other administrations, they can’t establish that Bush was the first.
oh who cares… is what BushCo is doing right, or not ?
Ah, but the question that remains to be seen, cleek, is whether this is a systemic problem that requires a structural fix, or merely yet another problem brought on by an overreaching administration that can be solved by throwing them out. If the latter, it is relatively minor. If the former, we have a much bigger problem.
Nell,
Short of banning private contributions to those running for office, I’d submit that private groups will always be able to get the attention of our elected representatives.
Further, how does public financing deal with people outside the two major parties? Do we make the Republican and Democratic parties de facto elements of our government?
G’Kar, similar data for the 2006 elections would show something quite different. A boatload of rural areas in my state increased their Dem performance dramatically.
The facts of deaths and injuries from the Iraq and Afghan wars have something to do with this.
Having been born and raised in a rural area, having lived in a succession of cities for twenty years, and having returned home, the rural/urban divide is not exactly news to me. It’s a culture war that will be best solved by conversation and communication, not the model of recent history promoted by all right-wing Republicans and some clueless urban liberal Dems: ressentiment, stereotyping, and fantasies of secession.
“I mean, the mechanism did exist to prevent Gonzales and Ashcroft from being confirmed–the solution may simply be that ‘the President gets the cabinet he wants’ rule cannot apply to the Attorney General; that should be more like a Supreme Court confirmation.”
The difference being, of course, that SCOTUS is a lifetime appointment, and the A-G isn’t. Also, of course, the A-G is supposed to have a degree of independence. This is neither a new idea, nor does it require restructuring of our government, since it’s simply long been the traditional view that the A-G is the chief law enforcement officer of the U.S., not the President’s personal attorney/advocate (that’s the job of the White House counsel); this was, of course, brought up at Gonzales’ confirmation hearings, and he duly affirmed (gave lip service) to the principle.
The solution to an Executive officer who has engaged in malfeasance, or derilection, or disregard for Congress and the law, is, of course, impeachment. I don’t at all see why we need to come up with a new Constitution for a cure, and neither am I remotely optimistic that the Law Of Unintended Consequences would help bring us to some great improvement, given how quite equally troubled by corruption and politicization parliamentary systems are. If you’d like to argue the case that, say, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and parliamentary systems in general, have grossly less corruption or malfeasance or politicization, than we do, I’ll listen with interest, to be sure. But deep skepticism will also take a seat with me, because I’ve yet to notice this to date, and I do pay some attention.
As it happens, Britain is currently going through the honours-for-money scandal, which has been ongoing for years, which is contributing to the ongoing let’s-completely-reform-the-House-of-Lords with more, or nothing but, elections, reform movement, just as Britain has been moving to make their justice system less parliamentary, and more like ours.
In both situations: the structure of parliament (Lords), and the justice system, the British are moving to be less traditionally parliamentary, and more American; perhaps you should explain to them how and why they’re moving in the wrong direction.
Similarly, Israel moved to having an independently elected P.M. — away from the strict parliamentary structure — although in traditional Israeli fashion they’ve since somewhat been going back and forth.
Grass-is-greener syndrome is usually endemic, which is part of why I’m always skeptical of it.
But I’m particularly dubious about the virtues of the Napoleanic justice system as somehow less politicized, and generally superior, though every system has some points.
@G’Kar: Public financing would probably deal with parties other than the two major ones the same way the rest of our electoral mechanisms do: By setting performance standards difficult (but not impossible) to meet.
The structural obstacles to the success of third parties exist from top to bottom in our system of government. At a very low level, e.g., all local Boards of Election of which I’m aware are divided among representatives of the two major parties, and no others. Few if any states provide for anything else.
It’s, of course, a question of longstanding disagreement between the left and right, whether the existance of differential impact, divorced from any other evidence, is proof of discrimination. I fall firmly on the right side of that divide.
Does that mean you think it is proof, or isn’t? If the latter, does that mean you simpy reject statistical analysis out of hand as a way of establishing discrimination, or anything else for that matter?
“When a new Administration starts, all the political appointees from the previous Administration are fired. It’s standard procedure, so the new Administration can install its own political appointees.”
But everyone knows that. That can’t be what Charles was referring to: he couldn’t that ignorant, surely?
(Of course, this is the guy who complained that AP had updated a story without explaining that it had been updated, and who was thus writing at length about wire services practices without the faintest clue as to what he was talking about as regards one of the most basic facts about the news business in our country in over a hundred years — that the whole point of a wire service is that they continuously update stories “without notice” of the changes — so I suppose it isn’t completely inconceivable.)
“Neatly, if deceptively, dismissed, Gary.”
Huh? How?
As is so often the case, you are taking a tangential point as some sort of disagreement, and it’s purely imaginary on your part; I didn’t disagree with you about the faintest thing in that comment, let alone “dismiss” something.
Discussion goes in all sorts of directions: it’s not always about your points, or disagreeing or agreeing with you, G’Kar. I made an observation that did neither.
“deceptively”
But thanks so much for once again accusing me of being dishonest in casual conversation: it makes engaging in friendly, casual, conversation with you such a pleasure.
Not to mention that it seems to be that accusing me of being “deceptive” is a violation of both the letter, and spirit, of the posting rules.
Out of curiosity, Nell, when you say that all right-wing Republicans have fantasies about ressentiment, stereotypes and secession, do you mean that there are no right-wing Republicans anywhere in the United States who do not possess those three traits, or are you engaging in a touch of stereotyping yourself?
As for public financing, I am aware of the difficulties currently faced by third parties in the United States. I simply am not of the opinion that this is necessarily a good thing.
Oh, the Supreme Court is a lifetime appointment! Wow, I had no idea.
But there are 9 of them, and 1 AG, and there are ways for the executive to make sure certain cases never get to the Supreme Court.
The point is that a two party system, which we will have indefinitely, makes impeachment an almost always empty threat. It takes 40 votes to not confirm an AG who you can expect to abuse power; 27 more than that to remove one from office via impeachment.
You have a point about grass-is-greener syndrome; if the advantage of the parliamentary system is removing an executive who has lost the public’s confidence…
But a lot of the things that so disgust me could be changed by statute and could have been stopped in the first place if the Democrats actually cared.
Further to G’Kar: I’m almost as dissatisfied with the structural dominance of the two-party system as you are. If this country’s political system were to change in a more parliamentary direction, I’d be one of the first to bolt to a party to the left of the one I’m in now.
I have voted, contributed, and done volunteer work for a third party in the past.
But at the moment I see more promise in boring from within. Currently, my interests align with those of rank-and-file Dems of all ideological stripes in increasing my party’s responsiveness to its voters (rather than merely, as in the recent past, to its funders and organizational mobilizers).
Libertarians are, by the very nature of their belief system, at a disadvantage in having a similar kind of effect within either of the major parties.
“Short of banning private contributions to those running for office, I’d submit that private groups will always be able to get the attention of our elected representatives.”
I’m sure that banning private contributions wouldn’t eliminate that possibility, as well. (Note: this is an agreement with you.)
I do look with favor on the notion of requiring that contributions be done through a blind: that all Congressional and Presidential contributions go into a pool, with no politician being able to determine who contributed specifically to them, or any other politician. (Mind, all contributions to the pool, overall, would still be publically listed.) This would seem to lessen the influence of contributions, would it not?
I’d say that if that was a good idea, we should have just skipped the Civil War, and gone directly to that; it would have saved a great deal of trouble to get to the same result.
Was this not your argument, Gary? I copied and pasted it, so I believe that it is, but perhaps you can explain otherwise. If not, this seems a classic example of a strawman argument: you claim that breaking the U.S. up today would be no different than not having fought the American Civil War in 1861. This is clearly incorrect on the merits and is obviously not the argument I was making. And since a strawman argument is by definitional deceptive, the term seemed apt.
As for the rest of your argument, suffice it to say that perhaps dragging old resentments into a different relationship is unhelpful at best.
“Oh, the Supreme Court is a lifetime appointment! Wow, I had no idea.”
Did I say something to earn this sarcasm?
Jeepers, if everyone is in a bad temper, I have plenty of other things to do than try friendly conversation around here.
No, G’Kar, I’m saying that all right-wing Republicans have, through the issues they promote and the political campaigns they’ve supported, employed ressentiment (what else is the “liberal elite” and culture-war crap about?) No stereotyping involved.
The fantasy of secession is actually more prevalent among urbanites in blue states, reaching a peak in December 2004 that was hard for those of us blue specks in a red sea to endure. But endure we did, and now there’s a lot less of that talk.
That seems a good idea, Gary, as it would at once reduce the ability of people to directly influence representatives which would, in turn, reduce the incentive for people to contribute and therefore might place some downward pressure on the amount of money flowing into politics. On the other hand, this would also increase the power of the parties if they were given the ability to apportion the money, and if the money was simply given to candidates according to some predetermined formula, it might be objected to on free speech grounds, as there are many small donors who contribute to a particular candidate because they like that candidate and they might not like the thought of having that ability taken away from them.
Nell,
I concur with your assessment of libertarians. People who merely want government to leave them alone are generally uncomfortable attempting to move into positions of power in that same government. That is no small reason why elective systems tend to decay as they do, whether it is a local PTA board or the federal government of the United States. We would have been better off if the Constitution had come with an expiration date at which time the states would have to start over from ground zero.
“This is clearly incorrect on the merits and is obviously not the argument I was making.”
Tangential: t, a, n, g, e, n, t, i, a, l. Digressive observation.
Useful concepts to be familiar with.
If you’d like me to not get irritated, or worse, when you accuse me of being “deceptive” or using a “strawman,” I’d ask you to try becoming familiar with these concepts, and to quit making such accusations.
It seemed to me that if it were a better idea for the U.S. to instead be several smaller regional countries, that it would have been a better idea to have gone for that without having to have first gone through all the death and destruction of the Civil War. That’s the thought that occurred to me when I read your suggestion that such a set-up would be a better idea. You’re free to agree or disagree. You’re also free to misunderstand and misread me. If or when you read that statement as in some way disagreeing with what you had said, that’s what you’re doing. I don’t even know what the heck it is I’m supposed to have disagreed with, for pete’s sake!
How the hell can I be “disagreeing” with you and not know it? Let alone be “deceptive” in the process!?
Sheesh!
What part of “I. Was. Not. Disagreeing. With. You.” is unclear?
(If you think it’s irrelevant that we’ve gone through this precise cycle of you insisting I’ve disagree with you, when I’ve made a tangential observation, countless times, for year after year after year now, you’re also free to do that, but my own observation is that we’ve now gone through this dozens of times, and I find it deeply unpleasant for you to continue to make such accusations about my personal honor at me. It’s quite possible that it would be for the best for both of us for me to take up not responding to you at all, so as to break the cycle, just as I’d twice stopped commenting on your blog; this repeated pattern does neither of us any good.)
“On the other hand, this would also increase the power of the parties if they were given the ability to apportion the money, and if the money was simply given to candidates according to some predetermined formula”
No, the notion is that people could still donate to whomever they want (with limits or without is a separate question) — but the fact of who any specific donation is intended for would be unknown, or at least unproven, to the politician (and therefore anyone else), and thus no one could have the benefit of saying “well, I donated $10K to you, so I expect an appointment to discuss my interests.”
It’s hardly foolproof, but still seems to have virtues, both of retaining much individual freedom and choice, but lessening influence compared to our present system.
The parties apportioning that money would not be part of the system, and neither would predetermined formulas. Just a blind intermediary body (obviously with lots of internal auditing and other safeguards included).
Strange coincidence, Althouse at Instapundit points to Chicago Sun Times article about government corruption.
New Jersey, Illinois and Louisiana are the usual suspects. Of course the Ryan administration in Illinois was Republican, and it was investigated thoroughly. But lookit, the Chicago political scene is almost 100% Democrats, so almost 100% of the corruption in Chicago is among Democrats. So you have the most corrupt states and most corrupt cities being run by Democrats. Is it any wonder that more Democrats are being investigated?
Gary,
You have an impressive talent for eliding blame. Whenever a dispute occurs around you, somehow it is always the fault of the other fellow. I envy that talent.
I will solve your problem, however. As you seem bound and determined to treat me as if I were a specific person you’ve had dealing with in the past, I’ll simply refrain from commenting here at all. Consider: if I am, in fact, the person you think I am, then I am using a pseudonym for a reason and if that pseudonym is affiliated with the real me, it does me no good. If I am not who you believe me to be, then I remain saddled with years of baggage built up between you and whoever you think I am. In either case, it seems imprudent for me to remain, particularly when my presence seems to rile you so thoroughly. So I cede the field to you, sir.
“Does that mean you think it is proof, or isn’t? If the latter, does that mean you simpy reject statistical analysis out of hand as a way of establishing discrimination, or anything else for that matter?”
Not proof.
Look, statistical analysis is useful. And I’ve already said that if, in addition to being investigated/charged at a disproportionate rate, Democrats turn out to be aquitted at a higher rate than Republicans, that would cinch the case for discrimination so far as I was concerned. Is that not an application of statistical analysis?
The problem here is that if Democrats are being investigated/charged at a disproportionate rate, and convicted in a percentage of cases similar to cases involving Republicans, the simplest explaination is that Democrats are just more likely to be corrupt, and ought to be getting investigated/charged more often.
While that’s not an explaination for the statistics they collected which you’d expect Democrats to embrace, it’s certainly not one social scientists, as such, should consider so implausible that they don’t see any need to investigate the possiblity.
That’s why I say this was bad science, because they arrived at conclusions when they didn’t bother collecting all the data needed to justify their conclusions.
Particularly when they conclude that, not only is the Bush administration engaging in political profiling, but that they’re the first. How the heck can you state that with any confidence at all, when you don’t bother to check if previous administrations did the same???
“So you have the most corrupt states and most corrupt cities being run by Democrats.”
Naturally, you say this, but don’t support it with any cites or facts at all.
Why would anyone not just accept it as surely true? It just must be true: it must be!
I regretted the news about Ohio seceding, myself.
G’Kar [on ‘blind’ contributions]: On the other hand, this would also increase the power of the parties if they were given the ability to apportion the money, and if the money was simply given to candidates according to some predetermined formula, it might be objected to on free speech grounds
I want to support this point of G’Kar’s as strongly as is humanly possible.
I follow campaign finance issues closely, yet somehow it had escaped me until this week that some change to the laws has allowed both major parties’ campaign committees to set up “independent expenditure” arms: they allow the DCCC and RNCC to take in more overall contributions, but the ads that the “independent” committees pay for cannot be affected, even by the candidates on whose behalf they are produced.
In the 2006 cycle, the first for this new wrinkle, the Republicans spent $20 million more in this way than the Dems, and their ads were egregiously sleazy and fact-free. A number of Republican candidates found to their horror that there was literally nothing they could do to stop the ads.
Despite the fact that the comparable ads run by the Dems’ “independent” arm were factually based, though also predominantly negative, I am no more happy about this situation than the disgruntled R candidates.
This is outrageous, and I urge anyone to avoid giving to their party’s Congressional or Senate campaign committees until this is reversed. Donors to these committees, for the most part, have no idea of the extent to which they are removing control from their favored candidates.
“In either case, it seems imprudent for me to remain, particularly when my presence seems to rile you so thoroughly.”
Oh, please. I have 0 desire to influence you to go away from here; I, of course, think you have much to contribute. (I never would have commented so much in response to your writing if I didn’t enjoy and admire and respect it; I have no record of repeatedly commenting on blogs by bloggers I feel otherwise about.)
I certainly desire that you continue to comment here; I refuse to let you blame me for any decision otherwise. I shall certainly not comment in response to you, if that would help (I was hoping that that wouldn’t be necessary, but if it is, I’ll live with it). But I won’t otherwise accept any responsibility for driving you away; I’d be as apt to entirely quit commenting here myself, rather than let you put me in that position.
My understanding is that we were preserving deniability of any other identification of G’Kar; I wasn’t aware we were pretending that you were some complete newcomer to this blog and the internet; if that’s your preference, I’m certainly willing to cooperate in that, as necessary. I simply hadn’t known that that was your preference, and you’d not communicated that preference previously to me, you know.
Feel free to clarify, whether here or in e-mail; I merely thought that keeping you out of trouble with your employers was the point of your current posting name, not some sort of attempt to Start A Whole New Identity. But whatever your preference, I’m surely interested in making things as easy as possible for you, within any bounds of reason, and seek to do nothing more in that regard than fulfill your preferences. If your preference is that “G’Kar” is a wholly fresh slate, well, I don’t think you’d be entirely reasonable if you expected people to play “let’s pretend” to the point of wiping out their memory, but insofar as you’d prefer that folks act that way in public, fine, I’ll certainly do my best (rather than simply not say anything that would in any way put you in danger of being identified by your employers, which is what I had thought was the idea, up to now). If that’s the case, I apologize for my previous misunderstanding. But please do let me know what your preferences are, because I can’t follow them otherwise, and it wouldn’t be reasonable for you to expect me to mind-read from you what your preferences were, or be angry at me for not having done so.
Otherwise, could we try a little less drama, please?
G’Kar: As you seem bound and determined to treat me as if I were a specific person you’ve had dealing with in the past, I’ll simply refrain from commenting here at all.
I find it more effective simply to refrain from commenting/communicating with Gary Farber at all.
cleek: oh who cares… is what BushCo is doing right, or not ?
I’m not sure Brett cares.
It’s extremely simple: McCain-Feingold placed limits on what the national committees can do. Obviously, and of course, independent groups aren’t affected by those limitations: that’s not a “change”; that’s the First Amendment, and non-totalitarianism.
Everything else is elaboration; it’s just that simple. To change this would require yet some other new law as regards campaign restrictions.
“This is outrageous, and I urge anyone to avoid giving to their party’s Congressional or Senate campaign committees until this is reversed.”
What do you propose, specifically? I’m pretty unclear where you’re precisely desiring to draw the line, since I’m presuming you don’t want to change the law to allow no one to engage in political advertising in the U.S. unless one of the two national political committees, or a candidate, agrees to that ad.
Advertising in political campaigns that isn’t authorized by national committees and candidates isn’t exactly a new thing, after all.
Isn’t Nell’s precise problem that they’re NOT actually independent of the national party committees? (Nell, could you clarify?)
I regretted the news about Ohio seceding, myself.
As an Ohioan, what news? Am I now a Canadian, eh? Or are you regretting that Ohio DIDN’T secede? You may have a point…
Gary, you’ve been critical in the past of people who don’t follow the links. I will simply ask you to follow the link. (Unfortunately, as I learned in correspondence with the reporter, Rick Klein, the very informative sidebar graphic that ran with the story in the print edition of the Globe did not make it online.)
I’m intimately familiar with the traditional understanding of independent expenditure organizations in campaign seasons, having worked for more than one. Up until the 2006 cycle, they were usually pre-existing issue-focused organizations, and occasionally manufactured partisan 527s like the ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’.
However, this is something new. Some law (I still have not succeeded in finding out which it was, who introduced it, or when it was passed) was passed between 2004 and 2006 to allow the DCCC and RNCC (and, I’m assmuming, the parties’ corresponding Senate campaign committees) to set up so-called “independent expenditure” arms that can spend money on behalf of candidates without the candidate having squat to say about it.
Here’s a clip from an (otherwise unrelated) Washington Monthly article that gives the flavor of what’s going on:
In response to Katherine’s question, yes: my objection to this is that these “independent expenditure” organizations are in no real way independent of the party committees (unlike, say, the League of Conservation Voters) except in the worst way: they are beyond the control of the candidates on whose behalf they purportedly work.
Sure, I care. My point is, without knowing more, we don’t know whether what “BushCo” are doing is right or not. And you shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Maybe Democrats are getting prosecuted in disproportionate numbers because there are lots of Democrats who deserve to be prosecuted.
Should be easy to establish, and they didn’t bother. Why not?
Brett: My point is, without knowing more, we don’t know whether what “BushCo” are doing is right or not.
We know that they’re sacking prosecutors who decline to go after Democratic politicians or who want to investigate Republican politicians. Your assertion that this is “business as usual” (aka “Clinton did it too!”) is not backed up by any data that you’ve cited. Your making a big deal of “we don’t know if BushCo are the first” isn’t particularly important – what does it matter if they’re the first administration to do this? Your point that data from other administrations would be useful is valid: your claim that without that data we don’t know that the Bush administration is doing anything wrong is nonsense.
Anyway, back to the main topic of the thread:
Congress must pass, ASAP, legislation restoring the pre-2006 method by which U.S. Attorneys are appointed, which requires confirmation by the Senate.
Depending on what the testimony of the five recently subpoenaed DoJ staffers reveals, Gonzales should be impeached. He would surely resign rather than subject the administration to the disclosures that could come out of impeachment hearings.
On the already-many-times-proven principle that in the Bush-Cheney administration, it could always get worse, some hack might be nominated. But, in fact, given the new makeup of the Senate Judiciary Committee, it’s likely Bush would have to appoint someone with more commitment to the law than to the regime.
That would make Gonzales available, as a private citizen, for all kinds of testimony under oath.
“Gary, you’ve been critical in the past of people who don’t follow the links. I will simply ask you to follow the link.”
I read the article when it appeared, as well as various other articles on the independiture arms of the national committees back during the election, when there were dozens and dozens and dozens of such articles (not to hammer the point; we all miss stuff, including me, and I tend to have more time to read such stuff than most people; just noting that this was not, in fact, obscure, nor remotely new to me, so I don’t need to reread Klein’s piece a third time, or Kevin Drum, or anything else I’ve already read).
“…my objection to this is that these ‘independent expenditure’ organizations are in no real way independent of the party committees”
They aren’t, in the sense that the party committees established them, but they are in that thereafter they’re allowed no contact. I’m absolutely positively completely open to suggestions as to what should be changed to Make Things Better, which is why I asked what your suggestions might be.
To be clear, I’m inclined to be pessimistic about a lot of campaign reform proposals.
In abstract, I think that one of the absolutely most root evils of our political system is that the power of money has such overwhelming influence, compared to the power of individual votes, and even most, or at least, much, organizing.
In practice, I’m pessimistic about most reform proposals — not hostile!; just pessimistic! — because we live in a capitalistic society, and money is immensely fungible; it’s very very difficult to get around the fact that — as demonstrated by the history of campaign reform legislation — if money is plugged from flowing out one outlet, and into a particular inlet in the political system, it strongly tends to find a way (that is, the possessors of the money, and their lawyers and accountants tend to find a way) back into the political system one way or another.
I am not saying that therefore campaign reform is all hopeless, and we should just give up and go home. I am only saying that this fungibility of the influence of money needs to be taken into account, so that no one winds up surprised that it turns out, after a given reform, that there’s another way invented for money to influence politicians or voters. I’m not sure that there’s any way ultimately around that, absent more radical “reform” than I may wish to contemplate.
Anyway, as regards the specific situation of the national party committees having “independent expenditure” wings, I’m not clear what you want to do about them — which is why I ask — and whatever it is, I’m yet further unclear whether it would substantially change anything, so long as people are free to set up actual independent funds/committees to support parties.
What if the RNC and DNC didn’t give an “independent expenditure” committee any start in any way, but instead mere former members of the committee, or other supporters of the Republican or Democratic Party (yes, the Republicans have been vastly dirtier, but we’re talking theory at the moment) set them up, instead: how would the result be significantly different? How would we not wind up with the same ads, and the same inability of the committees and candidates to affect them? What would be the improvement, precisely?
I don’t ask for the sake of argument; I ask because I don’t know the answer.
Since it’s nice to agree with people, rather than disagree, let me emphatically agree with all of Nell’s comment of 5:54 PM.
Gary, if you read the Klein article “when it first appeared”, which is all of a week ago, then why did you respond to me at 5:01 above as if I were talking about “independent expenditures” as they existed before this new law allowed the creations of IEs by party organizations, which is completely new?
What I want is to cancel that new law, to return to the status quo ante in which candidates have some influence over ads run by the DCCC and RNCC on their behalf. There is a huge difference between groups that have no participation or assistance from the party committees and fake independent expenditures which are allowed to be created with money donated to the party committees.
As a DCCC donor, I want to know that any Dem candidate who doesn’t like the ads run on his or her behalf with my money can call and give Rahm Emanuel hell and get them stopped.
I’ve got to get in the shower now if I’m going to make it to that 7:30 meeting. Later.
Gary: Just to clarify, and be concise: the crucial difference between the pernicious new law and your hypothetical IE committee set up by party hacks not formally employed by the party committees is the use of money already collected by the party committee.
In your hypothetical, the IE group would need to raise money on its own, without the ‘brand’ of the party committee. It would not be nearly as successful, particularly once word gets around about the unaccountability of such an organization.
If people want to give through the party, they have a right to expect the party to be accountable to the candidate (and vice versa). If they want to give through an IE, they should be given a clear sense that that’s what they’re doing.
Ah, but the question that remains to be seen, cleek, is whether this is a systemic problem that requires a…
i will repeat myself: is what Bush is doing right, or not?
Cleek, we have to establish what Bush is doing, before we can determine whether or not it’s right. My point all along here has been that they didn’t collect the data necessary to determine that.
Maybe they’ll remedy that lack, now that it’s been pointed out to them?
Naturally, you say this, but don’t support it with any cites or facts at all.
Why would anyone not just accept it as surely true? It just must be true: it must be!
Well that brought a smile to my face.
I’ll get a magic silver shovel and try to dig up some evidence.
This is a decent piece today that outlines both the general background of U.S. Attorneys, and the specifics regarding these eight; those who haven’t been following along, or who aren’t familiar with the system, might find it helpful.
DaveC, I’d like to congratulate you on proving that Chicago, Illinois, has a history of corruption; that’s certainly a controversial point that all liberals previously contested, but I’ll have to surrender to you on that one.
Re: impeaching Gonzales
As Dirty Harry would say: go ahead Democrat punks, make my day!
Seriously, Republicans would like nothing better than this. Can you say political hari-kiri? How do you think Democrat-leaning Hispanic voters would react to such a move?
While the conventional liberal wisdom has been that this past week was very bad for the Administration, as is usual with liberals, they are completely off the mark.
Here are some important things they have entirely missed.
1) There has been a dramatic improvement of the Iraq situation – the surge has succeeded beyond the wildest hopes of the Administration. See Kagan’s oped in today’s Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030901839.html
In addition Iran’s meddling has been thwarted and they seem to be beginning to accede to US demands with respect to their nuclear program.
2) There are very promising new peace initiatives in the Middle East – watch for dramatic developments soon.
3) Robert Gates is proving to be a bold and decisive Defense Secretary and military morale has rebounded to its highest levels since 2001.
3) AG Gonzales has gotten a second wind. His purge of US Attorneys has rejuvenated the Justice Department. Contrary to what you read here and in the liberal press, the IG report on comparatively minor shortcomings in the FBI show that the internal controls of the Justice Department are effective.
4) President Bush’s trip to Latin America is a rousing diplomatic success. Chavez’s attempt to spoil this have backfired spectacularly.
5) Congressional Democrats are in total disarray. Developments in Iraq and the Middle East will make it much much worse. Watch for Steny Hoyer to stage a coup against Pelosi. (He has never forgiven her for trying to dump him from the leadership team and replace him with Murtha.) Also watch for Joe Lieberman to flip the Senate back to the Republicans.
By this time next year things will look very bleak for Democrats. President Bush will have a free hand in appointing his chosen successor to continue his enlightened policies, and have his choice overwhelmingly endorsed by the electorate. And he will go down in history as a great statesman and world leader.
we have to establish what Bush is doing, before we can determine whether or not it’s right. My point all along here has been that they didn’t collect the data necessary to determine that.
What is Bush doing? Here’s something from the LA Times, via Kevin Drum:
What does it sound like to you?
“There has been a dramatic improvement of the Iraq situation – the surge has succeeded beyond the wildest hopes of the Administration.”
Excellent news!
That means that the drawdown can begin shortly, right?
“While the conventional liberal wisdom has been that this past week was very bad for the Administration, as is usual with liberals, they are completely off the mark.”
Good to know! We can only wish for more such weeks, that are equally bad for liberals!
“Here’s something from the LA Times, via Kevin Drum”
Or even my comment of 10:04 PM.
Or even my comment of 10:04 PM.
That too.
nabalzbbfr, that all sounds very exciting. Just one question, since you seem to be so plugged in:
Who is Bush’s “chosen successor”?
“President Bush’s trip to Latin America is a rousing diplomatic success.”
Noted without comment.
I’m trying to figure out if nabalzbbfr is trying to pull a floyd alvis cooper. If so, he’s not too shabby.
Otherwise, nabalzbbfr (if that is even your real name), you do realize that Robert Kagan, who wrote the Washington Post Op-Ed is the brother of Frederick Kagan, the primary architect and public advocate of the surge. The other points in the comment are of course equally hilarious.
Brett: My point all along here has been that they didn’t collect the data necessary to determine that.
In what way is the data incomplete as to what the Bush administration is doing? I’ve seen you demonstrate quite capably that “they” — whoever they are, I’ve lost track at this point [and that’s not snideness directed at you, I really have] — haven’t proven that this is unprecedented, but, as others have noted, that’s not at all the same thing.
Wow. That opening question is one of the most awkward I’ve ever written. If it doesn’t make sense, I’ll try rephrasing it when I have a functioning brain cell.
Anarch, if we’re all on the same page that Brett rightly points out that no one’s proved that what the Bush administration is doing is unprecedented, Brett is also asserting that it isn’t proven that:
the reason these prosecutors are being sacked
(for refusing to investigate Democratic politicians, or for insisting on investigating Republican politicians)
isn’t because the Bush administration is biased against Democratic politicians (not proven, Brett says, without data from earlier administrations)
but because Democratic politicians are just way more corrupt than Republicans, and (without data from earlier administrations)
it’s possible that earlier administrations tended to protect Democratic politicians at the expense of Republican politicians
and these firings are just reversing that policy.
I think this is the theory.
we have to establish what Bush is doing
we already know.
More or less, anyway.
I would say that the relevant evidence with regards to whether the current high rate of investigating/charging Democrats is a result of bias, would be the conviction rate. If those excess charges are a result of bias, rather than excess Democratic corruption, then presumably they’re bringing a lot of weak cases, which ought to produce a lot of aquittals.
If the aquittal rate for Democrats is substantially higher than for Republicans, I will readily concede that we’re in the middle of a partisan witch hunt. If it’s the same, or lower, that’s evidence that we’re not.
I personally find that 7-1 ratio rather hard to swallow, so I won’t be much suprised if it turns out to be a witch hunt. But I don’t think it has been proven to be such, and I’m rather suprised at the failure of the study to collect obviously relevant data.
Cleek,
“It’s not what you don’t know that’s so dangerous. It’s the things you think you know that just ain’t so.”
Mark Twain
“It’s the things you think you know…”
ah, Rumsfeld’s famously-unmentioned fourth category of knowledge.
Brett, if half of all people stopped for speeding on the Beltway are black, but all those stopped are guilty, would you think something fishy was going on?
What if you knew that only 15% of drivers on the Beltway are black?
Then what if a couple of cops were fired for not giving enough tickets to black people? I think that would be enough right there.
The only thing missing is whether or not its unprecedented. Even if it isn’t, there’s still a problem, and it still needs to be fixed.
I would say that the relevant evidence with regards to whether the current high rate of investigating/charging Democrats is a result of bias, would be the conviction rate.
Unfortunately, this wouldn’t prove much since it presumably wouldn’t include those cases where GOP investigations were dropped or put on the back burner.
Nor are outcomes necessarily germane in this matter. In a close election, an indictment or the threat of one, could be the difference.
“Brett, if half of all people stopped for speeding on the Beltway are black, but all those stopped are guilty, would you think something fishy was going on?”
I’d think it was worth checking to see if something fishy was going on, but I’m not going to assume, a priori, that all groups have identical proclivities to violate traffic laws. Or engage in political corruption…
“Nor are outcomes necessarily germane in this matter. In a close election, an indictment or the threat of one, could be the difference.”
LOL! Bush’s daddy sure learned that, didn’t he? Indictments right before the election, and “Never mind!” right after…
Anyway, I’ve already stated what evidence would prove to me that this is a political witch hunt. Mind explaining what evidence would convince you guys that it isn’t?
The 8 U.S. attorneys he’s fired were ones he (like all other U.S. Attorneys) appointed
OK, Gary, I’ll grant you that “fired” is technically too harsh a term. My point still remains that Bush would’ve been better off refraining from renewing the terms of the Clinton holdovers, and appointing new ones. As for the eight who were fired, they are subject to removal by the president, as is any other U.S. Attorney, but if there’s evidence that their ongoing investigations were obstructed, then those responsible for should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
It also looks like McNulty was being less than truthful when he said they were fired for performance reasons. It would have been more honest had he said that the administration wanted its own people in the jobs. I agree that the firings were wrong. Whether there was illegality involved, who knows, but what this mess does show is that this is another example of political mishandling by this administration. Rove was politically savvy enough to get Bush elected twice but when he’s not on a campaign, he’s a major liability. I also agree that the Patriot Act needs to be changed to restore the limit on interim US Attys.
I’ll argue your point about ambassadors’ being ‘unfortunately’ appointed by presidents.
I spent 25 years in the foreign service, working with both politically appointed and career ambassadors. Neither was categorically better or worse than the other. Some political ambassadors were jerks, but so too were some career ambassadors. Many career ambassadors reach that level simply by having put in their time and not creating problems. You often find the ‘Peter Principle’ in action among career ambassadors.
Political ambassadors have a distinct advantage in that they are personally known by the president and consequently have direct access. They can cut through the bureaucratic red tape. That’s why the most important ambassadorships–UK, Japan, Germany, etc.–always go to political appointees. Ambassadors are the personal representative of the President. ‘Personal’ is the operative word.
CB, it’s simply impossible to link ordinary change of administration change-overs with this thing. There is no sense at all to your assertion that GWB would have been better off had he released all Clinton era USAs. In what way? Has one of the holdovers done something? It’s really so totally unrelated to the current matter — which is about GWB appointed USAs being pressured to behave in an overtly partisan fashion — that it seems to me that the continued harping on it is bad faith.
Can you give a coherent explanation for the statement that GWB would have been better off letting holdovers go?
Again I agree with Brett on procedure, although I probably disagree with the default assumptions
Did anyone actually bother to READ the study and look at the data?
It’s NOT “8 to 1.” It’s 4 to 1 overall. And if you bother to check the data for federal & statewide officials (as separated from purely local officials) that portion drops out of the range of statistical signicance entirely, being about what one would expect within margins of error. At the federal/statewide level prosecutions are roughly equal to percentages of party affiliation. What has apparently been “overinvestigated” (at first glance) by party affiliation are local (municipal/county) officials, at 7 to 1 based solely on individuals named in news stories as under investigation, whether or not they were ever indicted.
Now, follow the chain of what Shields and Cragan ignored entirely: US Attorney’s offices are found in bigger cities, not in West Bejeebus. Big cities have a MAJOR tendency to be dominated by Democrats. Bigger cities also have many more opportunities for corruption. If officials are equally inclined to corruption regardless of party affiliation, and you investigate local corruption where your office is located, are you going to be investigating more Republicans or more Democrats? Uh huh.
Do we need equal opportunity in municipal corruption investigations? Can’t investigate a Democrat unless you also investigate a Republican, even though the “pool” of available “suspects” leans heavily Democratic by simple opportunity and political demographics? What a crock.
Shields and Cragan don’t even attempt to adjust for such things or even acknowledge such realities exist, and they openly include investigations begun under the Clinton admin in their database as Bush admin investigations. The Toricelli investigation began in 1996, for Ghu’s sake. The Traficant investigation was ongoing throughout the Clinton admin. Shields and Cragan put those on their “Bush admin” list. Same with the Carson and Colton investigations in California, begun under Clinton (nine of the “D” database points) when one of the principals involved walked into the US Atty’s office and confessed!
BS methodology at best, egregious cherry-picking and data-stacking at worst. This isn’t even close to good social science, for more reasons than just those laid out by Brett.
There is no sense at all to your assertion that GWB would have been better off had he released all Clinton era USAs
It’s just my opinion that liberals and the left side of the blogosphere would not have been so incensed if those fired were non-holdovers. It’s based on common sense, that Democrats aren’t going to pay as much attention to intra-party maneuverings, and that the folks who were fired wouldn’t (as a rule) trash the president who gave them the job in the first place. Most Republicans still adhere to the 11th Commandment.
Most Republicans still adhere to the 11th Commandment.
[must resist snark]
It’s just my opinion that liberals and the left side of the blogosphere would not have been so incensed if those fired were non-holdovers.
I’m pretty sure none of them were holdovers — US Attorneys generally serve a four year term. I looked through a couple of articles, and I’m not immediately seeing anything explicitly stating that the fired attorneys were Bush appointees, but given the timeing it doesn’t make sense that they’re anything but.
We’re not incensed because Clinton appointees were removed from office, we’re incensed because it appears that US Attorneys were fired for being unwilling to politicize law enforcement.
Charles,
“It’s just my opinion that liberals and the left side of the blogosphere would not have been so incensed if those fired were non-holdovers.”
Then your opinion is remarkably uneducated. To my knowledge, none of the US attorneys were appointed by Clinton. The Wikipedia articles on the ones generating the most headlines:
David Inglesias
Carol Lam
John McKay
Further, Wikipedia has an article on the entire contraversy. To the extent separate articles were written about each, none were holdovers.
Dantheman, you can also add H. E. Cummins to the list.
I’m not immediately seeing anything explicitly stating that the fired attorneys were Bush appointees
i believe i heard on NPR last week that they were Bush appointees.
Brett Bellmore <3
I hope someone takes his suggestions and looks up the acquittal rates and the behaviors of previous administrations. Before my father retired, he worked in public health service and he would talk about the political interference that started after the 2000 election. I've always wanted to know whether it was a government-wide partisan effort, or just the luck of his department that they had to deal with guys obsessed with being "on message".
Possible Instalanche? Not that anyone will actually care, mind you.
And if they had been Clinton appointees, Charles appears to imply that Hilzoy et al. were maliciously concealing the true source of their outrage — the commentariat was in fact furious that a few held-over political appointees finally got terminated, and just pretended to be angry about widescale abuse of power and practical disenfranchisement of half the population. After all, Hilzoy, Marshall, Krugman, and all of us librul commentators have so much more of a stake in the former than the latter.
Whodaheywhaa?
Charles, please, put down the KoolAid and step away slowly. You can still be saved.
Tully — Not sure if you’re right. You assume that corrupt municipal/county officials tend to be Democrats because big cities tend to be breeding grounds for corruption and to swing Democratic. But there are also a lot of small cities and rural counties in this country — are all of them simon-pure? It seems unlikely. Even if I grant your analysis, I would also like to point out, that the lack of statistical proof that the effort to intimidate AUSAs worked does not at all show that the effort was not made. It’s nice, if true, that we dodged the bullet; it’s also true that we did get shot at.
trilobite,
“Charles appears to imply that Hilzoy et al. were maliciously concealing the true source of their outrage”
Yes, he does. And of course, this cannot be mindreading, in light of Charles’s frequently expressed outrage when he thinks others do that to him.
The top three states with an endemic culture of political corruption are: Illinois, New Jersey, and Louisiana. All of which are primarily dominated by Democrats. And most public corruption cases are urban in origin, which means that they are likely to be overwhelmingly Democratic.
You assume that corrupt municipal/county officials tend to be Democrats because big cities tend to be breeding grounds for corruption and to swing Democratic. But there are also a lot of small cities and rural counties in this country — are all of them simon-pure? It seems unlikely.
Trilobite, read it again. I don’t make that assumption at all. Of course smaller municipalities are not exempt, but there’s less opportunity for major organized corruption in them in the first place. Smaller cities/towns/counties are oft corrupt as well, but in a more genteel and less-provable Good Ol’ Boy way, where Cousin Billy gets more concrete contracts by being related to Councilman Bubba, no cash exchanges involved, just back-scratching social connections. MUCH tougher to prove in court. Especially when the local jury pool is limited.
And they don’t tend to have US Atty’s offices in West Bejeebus. If as a US Atty you’re going to chase municipal corruption, you’re going to do it [1] where you are, and [2] where it’s most widespread and concentrated and blatant and therefore easiest to find and prove. Both big-metro-bias factors. And big cities are MAJORLY demographically inclined to be under Democratic control.
So just on the logistics of US Atty prosecutions alone one would expect such investigations to disproportionally have Democrats under the microscope in the first place, with no active bias involved at all, simply from the major urban weighting of Democratic-control concentration.
That does not mean elected Democrats are individually more inclined to corruption–you’d have to do a lot of adjusting to even approach that kind of conclusion with such flawed raw data. And it doesn’t mean that the investigations aren’t politically biased–simply can’t tell with junk data like that. But even with a completely nuetral application, the “available suspects” for such investigations are going to incline heavily towards the party with the greatest political representation in major metro areas with US Atty’s offices.
Bad study, invalid methodology, not remotely science. Fluff.
Again, I urge all commenters who have not done so to take a look at the Senate testimony of Lam, Iglesias, McKay, and Cummins.
Go to C-SPAN (for the next week, before the video scrolls off) and search videos for ‘Carol Lam’.
I especially recommend the passage where Bud Cummins describes reassuring his wife, while explaining to her the kinds of pressures to which the U.S. Attorney job might subject them, that “the Department [of Justice] will insulate me.” Also remarkable is the description by each of them of the call that ended their appointments.
Screwing around in the weeds of this study is fine if you’re having a good time doing it, but it doesn’t affect anything about the big picture of political corruption of the justice system.
To add to what Tully said, it is more likely that smaller fry rural corruption would be targeted by the States Attorney General than the US Attorney anyway. US Attorneys generally go after the big fish, they don’t have time for minnows. But when I do a search for recent public corruption cases in my state, which is pretty clean, this is the only one I find:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003475831_webbribery13.html
Its is a small city case in the hinterland, and since Washington does not record party registration I can’t tell what party the targets of the investigation are. And that is the way it should be.
“OK, Gary, I’ll grant you that “fired” is technically too harsh a term.”
For who? I’m sorry, I’m not clear what or who this is in reference to.
“My point still remains that Bush would’ve been better off refraining from renewing the terms of the Clinton holdovers, and appointing new ones.”
Which Clinton holdovers? Who are you talking about? And why? I’m sorry, I’m not following your point, Charles, or what you’re talking about.
Possible Instalanche? Not that anyone will actually care, mind you.
Well, it’s nice to see that Insty’s found someone to take over for him who’s got a similar lack of care for the actual truth. (I’m referring to the “revolt” in the comments.)
Nell:
“I would welcome information on any U.S. attorneys who have been relieved of their duties for whatever reason, over the course of the last six administrations. Placed in that context, I think the events of 2006 will speak for themselves.”
“March 24, 1993, Wednesday
By DAVID JOHNSTON, (Special to The New York Times); National Desk
Late Edition – Final, Section A, Page 1, Column 1, 1053 words
DISPLAYING ABSTRACT – Attorney General Janet Reno today demanded the prompt resignation of all United States Attorneys”.
All as in all 93 US attorneys nationwide.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00612F73C540C778EDDAA0894DB494D81
I have access to the NY Times archives, and there are some sentences in the article worth forwarding:
While prosecutors are routinely replaced after a change in Administration, Ms. Reno’s order accelerated what had been expected to be a leisurely changeover.
And…
Ms. Reno said United States Attorneys “are absolutely integral to the whole success of the Department of Justice,” and her aides said today that she did not intend to immediately remove any whose presence was required to complete an investigation.
One official suggested that even Mr. Stephens [investigating Democrat Rostenkowski] might be asked to stay on until a successor is named, saying Ms. Reno had made no decisions about who she may choose on an interim basis.
Reading along further, US Attorney Jay Stephens did resign, but the prosecution of Rostenkowski continued….
Mr. Stephens, the Republican-appointed prosecutor, whose sudden replacement prompted suspicions in Congress that the Clinton Administration might be squelching the Rostenkowski case, said in an interview today that he believed the investigative phase of the case had been brought to a proper conclusion. He credited the career prosecutors who stayed with the case from the beginning.
INDICTMENT OF A CONGRESSMAN: THE LEGAL CASE; Prosecutor No Stranger To Corruption in Politics
LEWIS,, NEIL A.. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Jun 2, 1994. pg. A.20
And yeah, Rostenkowski was later pardoned. Empirical proof of Clintonian suckitude.
True about smaller cases getting stateinvestigation rather than federal, Kazinski. I should have noted that corruption cases also have to rise to the level of federal attention, which cuts out a lot of the little fish–and also tends to concentrate attention on major metros.
Basically, if the corruption doesn’t extend upwards into the state or federal government, the feds don’t bother unless it’s handed to them on a platter or federal money is involved.
Tully,
Fancy meeting you here. (And your style is too unmistakable for you to just be another Tully.) I’d give you my id from the other blog where I know you from, but it would give me away to someone around here who knows me personally whom I like to harass incognito on occasion. I figured this place would be too left of center for you – too far a field. Get it?
@Kazinski: How many times does someone in this thread have to explain that U.S. Attorneys are political appointees, that it is absolutely routine for an incoming administration to replace them, whether en masse or in a leisurely fashion?
My challenge is: Point to any U.S. Attorney forced out by the administration that appointed him or her, in any administration since the end of WWII, that was not a case of malfeasance or inadequate performance. Much less eight or ten.
Although Bush signaled on Friday that he would drop his threat to veto it, Sen. Jon Kyl still apparently intends to try to block the repeal of the language slipped into the Patriot Act conference report that made this purge possible. Surely Republican Senators will not be so stupid as to vote against cloture.
(And before anyone starts in on snark about ‘reading bills before they’re passed’: until the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, it was absolutely unheard of to make changes to legislation after the conference report was produced. The conference report is the product of the joint House-Senate committee to reconcile differences between House- and Senate-passed versions of bills. In the old days, and now once again with Democratic control, the conference report is the final version of legislation that will be sent to the President for signature. There’s no need to look it over every four hours in case some overzealous Republican staffer has inserted a poison pill.)
And if anyone believes that a staffer, however senior, can insert new language into the conference report of an important piece of legislation without his boss’s knowledge and permission (much less language that removes the hearing and confirmation powers of the committee his boss chairs), then you need to learn more about how things work on Capitol Hill.
Damnit, once again, the ObWi “The requested URL was not found on this server” response to too many links. It’s really frustrating that the better one supports one’s argument, the harder ObWi makes it to post.
I’ll split the comment.
“It’s just my opinion that liberals and the left side of the blogosphere would not have been so incensed if those fired were non-holdovers.”
I’m sure it’s your opinion. Can you name these “holdovers,” please?
Did you bother to, you know, check the facts, or did you just imagine that they must be so?
Because, you know, the entire controversy is about the DOJ firing Republican Bush appointees. That’s been reported countless times, in pretty much every one of the innumerable, hundreds, of articles, published daily, for weeks. There have been House and Senate hearings.
Carol Lam:
David Iglesias:
White House notice.
Part II:
John McKay:
DOJ bio:
All of them:
I realize that political discussion is much easier for you when you simply imagine the facts, and then leave it to others to look them up to cite to you, but it’s putting a bit of an unfair effort on those of us who actually have the slightest idea as to what we’re talking about before we put fingers to keyboard, Charles.
CharleyCarp:
A study 3-4 years ago looked at the disproportionate issuance of tickets. Blacks received about half but were only about 20% of the drivers. (anyone that can find the actual details, please do.) Because of community outrage over profiling, a commission was formed to actually review videotape of traffic to determine what % of actual violations were committed by which ethnic groups. This commission was multi-ethnic and all members has to agree on what a violator’s race was or that person was not figured into the results. Bottom line, blacks were actually under-represented in the results. They actually committed a higher % of infractions than their ticketing level would indicate.
Brett’s points are right on. Data has no prejudices. It is the prejudices of the observor that lead to false interpretations of the data
hairshirthedonist: “…but it would give me away to someone around here who knows me personally whom I like to harass incognito on occasion.”
Charming.
Brett’s points are right on.
so Bush & Co are acting perfectly honorably, and there is nothing here to see. good to know. thanks.
I took a look at the study Krugman publicized (alleging partisan prosecutions) and wondered why retired professors of communication are writing about a non-communication subject.
Turns out that one of the co-authors, Donald Shields, is a Democrat Party campaign contributor. See http://www.opensecrets.org.
Guess that explains the “hit piece”, intellectually inadequate nature of the “study”.
livermoron: “A study 3-4 years ago”
A cite requires an actual cite, to be credible. You might as well not post a cite that contains no actual cite. A study several years ago indicated that no one has any reason to believe such non-cites.
As always, if people wish to link to something, a reminder that the format is: <A HREF=”URL”>words</A>
(Posting broken, non-clickable, HTML is also not very useful; here is a reference.)
@Bruce: That’s ‘Democratic Party’ to speakers of English.
Keep swimming in the weeds, fellas. Doesn’t change a thing about the big story: corruption of the justice system for partisan benefit.
Indeed. Anyone who has ever made a political contribution certainly has no credibility as regards any study, peer-reviewed or not, or opinion. Useful principle to always keep in mind.
I expect that Tom Maguire’s link will bring a number of comments that are equally dispositive.
If you are intellectually so open and curious, find it yourself. I don’t need to prove it exists, as I know it does. Whether you believe it or not, the underlying point about data misinterpretation remains valid.
Please now proven that you are really who you say you are. Nevermind. I do not care.
Turns out that one of the co-authors, Donald Shields, is a Democrat Party campaign contributor. See http://www.opensecrets.org.
$250 to Claire McCaskill. Incredible.
In support of livermoron, here’s an article from the WaPost dated July 2004 on the ticketing of drivers in Montgomery County, MD. It notes:
Brett is right. The data doesn’t prove what it claims.
First paragraph of article:
Thanks for the link.
So the cite goes, at present, to a report of an unfinished study. Just noting.
I didn’t pick the example of drivers on the Beltway because I wanted to make a point about stops in Montgomery County, and so the fact that the actual data in Montgomery County is different from the premises of my question is completely beside the point. (Which wasn’t about stops in Montgomery County anyway).
I assume, and based on experience I think this is a same assumption, that upwards of 90% of drivers on the Beltway speed at some point in their trip. Flow of traffic, outside rush hour, is nearly always north of 60, and often north of 65.
The real point, though, is the one that Brett avoids: would you think there’s a problem if you heard that cops were getting fired for failing to let white drivers go without a ticket, or for not getting enough tickets of black drivers? Yes, unless you had some reason to believe that the cop in question was corruptly biasing ticketing in the opposite direction. There is no such allegation here. These USAs were not corrupt, but were fired because they weren’t corrupt.
I have no earthly idea why CB doesn’t understand my question: why, given that these people aren’t Clinton holdovers, is he talking about Clinton holdovers?
Gary,
Did you notice that the “higher rate” mentioned in that first paragraph is 26%, the same as the rate for traffic camera tickets to cars registered to black owners. In other words, unless the traffic cameras are racist, the problem is disproportionate offending.
Also here is a published paper from the Journal of the American Statistical Association on the topic which also finds no bias in the rate of traffic stops.
Just noting…
“I have no earthly idea why CB doesn’t understand my question: why, given that these people aren’t Clinton holdovers, is he talking about Clinton holdovers?”
Apparently he thinks they are, because why else would liberals be complaining?
Charles, please do correct any error in this reading.
“Also here is a published paper from the Journal of the American Statistical Association on the topic which also finds no bias in the rate of traffic stops.”
Thanks; to be clear, if anyone hasn’t noticed, I’ve not, myself, been debating the content of any study; I’ve simply been pointing out that if one does wish to debate a study, it’s necessary to cite it, rather than to say some variant of “well, I once read something that proves my point, so therefore my point is proven correct.”
I actually have no interest in, at this time, and no comments about, traffic stats, or what percentages of smalltown corruption is Democratic, or whatever the actual topic is that studies have been non-cited as regards to in this thread, myself, but y’all carry on, and thanks to “John” for an actual cite.
“so Bush & Co are acting perfectly honorably, and there is nothing here to see. good to know. thanks.”
Are you actually as incapable as you appear, of distinguishing between, “Nothing here to see.” and “Why didn’t they bother to prove their case?” I’ve come right out and said that I didn’t find the ratio plausible, (Though the explaination that it was present in local corruption cases, not federal, changes that. There’s no good reason to expect a witch hunt to be limited to local offices.) and pointed out what sort of evidence they should have presented, if indeed they do want to make the case.
If it is perfectly OK for an incoming adminstration to fire US attorneys when they take office, so they can get their own team in, why isn’t it just as accecptable to occaisionally prune their team to make sure that the reasons they appointed the US attorney’s in the first place are still operative? I think for the most part the replacements are to give up and coming Republican prosecutors experience and a significant accomplishment on their resume for the future. Here is one example of a very young very qualified candidate getting an appointment to US Attorney in Minnesota. And if you can think of any reason she shouldn’t have gotten the job there is something wrong with you.
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/016994.php
Young, Smart, Good Looking, Civic minded, Minority, Conservative, Republican, Refugee from Communisim. She has got it going on.
If you can’t see what’s going on, Kazinski, it’s because you won’t. You’re not exactly covering the conservative Republican side of this discussion in glory.
Turns out that one of the co-authors, Donald Shields, is a Democrat Party campaign contributor. See http://www.opensecrets.org.
Guess that explains the “hit piece”, intellectually inadequate nature of the “study”.
Actually, no, but I leave the reasoning why as an excercise for the student (which you’re pretty obviously are….)
why isn’t it just as accecptable to occaisionally prune their team to make sure that the reasons they appointed the US attorney’s in the first place are still operative?
Depends on the reasons, I would say.
if you can think of any reason she shouldn’t have gotten the job there is something wrong with you.
Nothing wrong with me, but I don’t think 33-year olds ought to be US Attorneys. As OCSteve points out, these people have the power to make someone’s life absolute hell. Before we grant someone that power I’d like to be sure that she has enough experience and judgment to use it wisely, which I’m dubious someone maybe eight years out of law school has. I’d also like to be sure she’s not consumed with political ambition. I have no reason to think this nominee is, but young on-the-make lawyers as US Attorneys make me nervous. And that holds for Democrats as well.
Did you notice that the “higher rate” mentioned in that first paragraph is 26%, the same as the rate for traffic camera tickets to cars registered to black owners. In other words, unless the traffic cameras are racist, the problem is disproportionate offending.
Please note that this depends also on where traffic cameras are — and are not — located.
White Americans favor driving 10 mph below the speed limit, thus resulting in a higher stoppage/ticketing rate for African-Americans.
Are you actually as incapable as you appear, of distinguishing between, “Nothing here to see.” and “Why didn’t they bother to prove their case?”
if you look closely, you’ll see that i’m not the one shouting that there’s nothing to see here. i’m the one asking a very simple question (third time now): regardless of what Clinton did, what the ratio of traffic arrests is, regardless of what the ratio of prosecutions is, yadayadayada, is what Bush did right, or not?
and, you’re the one who’s not answering it.
go ahead, give it a shot. it’s a Yes or No question.
Just in case anyone is wondering, I thought I had heard that all the US Attorneys in question were Bush appointees. Since I didn’t think that mattered, I didn’t bother to check it out. So no, my outrage has nothing to do with my having operated under the erroneous assumption that they were Clinton holdovers.
Also: I have no problem with people occasionally firing political appointees for performance-related reasons. If that were what was going on here, I wouldn’t have any objection to that either.
Please note that this depends also on where traffic cameras are — and are not — located.
Good point, Phil.
BTW, congratulations on the new house.
I don’t even have any objection to them being fired for sheerly political reasons. They know when appointed that they serve at the pleasure of the appointer. Now, saying you were firing them for performance reasons (and thus somewhat tarring their reputations in some circles–while raising it in others) when it was really for political reasons would be obnoxious–but not even vaguely criminal.
The firings may or may not have been strictly political. The hearings by Congress are most assuredly completely political.
It’s neither here nor there who Shields donates to. Bad science remains bad science. That study proves nothing, and proves that badly. Laughable that we pay academics for producing such.
(Hey hairshirt–there be some bright people ’round here. I have to agree with all of them to enjoy reading what they say? Heh.)
I don’t even have any objection to them being fired for sheerly political reasons. They know when appointed that they serve at the pleasure of the appointer.
I do.
Ambitious prosecutors are bad enough. Those whose ambition is tied to pleasing a particular political faction are a serious danger.
“As OCSteve points out, these people have the power to make someone’s life absolute hell.”
Actually, they have part of the power to end someone’s life, as it’s they who tend to decide whether or not to ask for the death penalty in federal cases (although Washington also has some say, most particularly in the G. W. Bush Administration).
“Nothing wrong with me, but I don’t think 33-year olds ought to be US Attorneys.”
I wouldn’t agree that this means there should be a blanket ban on 33-year-olds, those immature kids, ever serving as a U.S. Attorney, though.
Thanks to all for finding the citation. I spent my time on other things. Gary doesn’t seem to understand the difference between a citation and an allusion: I purposely did not cite the study as the study itself is not important per se. What was important was the point about drawing conclusions from incomplete data… precisely the point made by Brett and which so many on this thread seem unable to comprehend. I could present other examples but you need to educate yourselves and develop your own powers of critical thinking. A good place to start would be by asking yourself “what info do I not have?”
CharleyCrab or whatever his name is doesn’t see that he undermines his own argument. His initial use of this example (note Gary, he provided no links either, but I am capable of understanding his point) only reinforces my contention as he jumps to conclusions with incomplete and non-contextual data.
Lefties upset the Pres. removed his own appointees? Why, next thing you’ll see is the Left taking offense at a joke that makes fun of Pres. Bush!
PS: Bernard – so you were up in arms when Clinton et al fired all those US attorneys en masse?
“I could present other examples but you need to educate yourselves and develop your own powers of critical thinking.”
Thank you for that helpful tip.
“CharleyCrab or whatever his name is”
It’s actually written down, for your aid in reading it.
Yes, please be condescending. That really supports your argument.
Brett’s points, as well as mine were written down too, but you failed to understand them.
Smugness is a nice retreat when you have nothing cogent to offer.
Wait for it…here comes his ‘I know you are but what am I response’
“Yes, please be condescending. That really supports your argument.”
Exactly.
“I could present other examples but you need to educate yourselves and develop your own powers of critical thinking.”
Possibly you didn’t notice how condescending you were there, and perhaps you didn’t understand that noting this out was my point: that’s an excellent way to get people to think you may not be interested in productive conversation; it’s certainly not a way to induce people into productive conversation, and neither is it an example of how to converse productively or pleasantly.
HTH. HAND.
And boom! there it is. Note, he still fails to address the issue.
Where has been your “productive” conversation? What I see are strawmen and an inability to recognize and argue an obvious point, irrespective of the rightness or wrongness of that point. In other words, you cannot productively converse because you don’t address the underlying basis of the argument.
and your mother wears army boots.
Um, sir, It wouldn’t have been the first time that a person has misremembered or misread a study. And since you did bring it up first, I do think the onus is on you to get an accurate cite.
I think this reflect more on you than it does on Gary.
His initial use of this example (note Gary, he provided no links either, but I am capable of understanding his point) only reinforces my contention as he jumps to conclusions with incomplete and non-contextual data.
OK, once more, and real slow so even people not used to adult conversation can get it: as is absolutely and perfectly clear from the context, my hypothetical about the ticketing on the Beltway was not intended to reflect any actual facts of who gets stopped on the Beltway, but merely as an example from which to illustrate the principle. I could as well have said “the Looking Glass Highway” but didn’t because many people haven’t heard of it (which is their loss).
I’m not saying that the study referenced in the post proves the point for which it is offered. I don’t need the study, or to know whether what the Administration is doing is absolutely unprecedented, to know that firing prosecutors because they are not behaving in a corrupt way is itself corrupt. If someone can point to an example of Bill Clinton, or Harry Truman, or Grover Cleveland firing a prosecutor for corrupt purposes, it doesn’t change anything at all about what this Administration is doing.
Now, saying you were firing them for performance reasons (and thus somewhat tarring their reputations in some circles–while raising it in others) when it was really for political reasons would be obnoxious–but not even vaguely criminal.
Let me get this straight: a USA getting fired because the person who appointed them didn’t want their party investigated is, to you, “not even vaguely criminal”? That seems… wrong. Really, really wrong. Lock-you-in-federal-prison-for-aiding-and-abetting kind of wrong.
livermoron: being snide to CharleyCarp is not a way to win friends here.
hilzoy — you’re obviously still reading. You obviously know that Tully and Brett’s points above are right on target (e.g., it’s bullshit to put out a study claiming that the Bush administration is the “first” to do something when the study didn’t even look at anything pre-Bush; the study counts Democratic investigations that began under Clinton; the study doesn’t control for the fact that Democratic local officials control most of the major cities in which corruption might arise). Do you seriously disagree with any of these points? If not, oughtn’t you issue a correction?
John Doe: do I say that the study shows anything about being “first”? No. Does Krugman? Does the study? No.
What I do think is that this administration seems plainly to have fired a bunch of USAttorneys for political reasons, often because they were not prosecuting Democrats aggressively enough. Krugman asks: shouldn’t we be wondering about the USAttorneys who didn’t get fired? What are the odds that only the ones who got fired were pressured, and all of them resisted? Wouldn’t it be a lot more serious if some were pressured and yielded?
The study is supporting evidence for Krugman’s argument, not its point. Moreover, I don’t think it’s wrong at all. It would be different if the claim that Bush were first was in any way its point, but it is not.
Also: profanity violates the posting rules.
John Doe gets the issue. And writes on point.
Gwangung: I wasn’t trying to prove that blacks are worse drivers or whatever. Nor was I trying to prove CharleyC wrong about the particulars of his example, I simply illustrated that a point he was making was incorrect because he commits the same error as the original posting: A lack of benchmark data (in his example, the percentage of drivers of a given racial class who actually break traffic laws). Charley was fine with pulling an arbitrary example to communicate a concept. I understood that the content of the study was irrelevant and worked purely as a hypothetical construct. I alluded to a non-hypothetical study that came up with a different conclusion based on more data and used it to illustrate a logical weakness in Charley’s post, i.e. that higher traffic tix cited to drivers of a given racial class is prima facia evidence of racial profiling.
I could have used other examples, real or hypothetical to disprove Charley’s reasoning, I just responded in the scenario he raised and refuted it.
With so many obtuse comments (not yours Charley…your position was on point) I see one needs to be more remedial in one’s argumentation.
I see I am being condescending and snide. I did that just by actually speaking to the issue. How interesting.
I’ll try to live with myself.
Gwangung: I wasn’t trying to prove that blacks are worse drivers or whatever. Nor was I trying to prove CharleyC wrong about the particulars of his example, I simply illustrated that a point he was making was incorrect because he commits the same error as the original posting: A lack of benchmark data (in his example, the percentage of drivers of a given racial class who actually break traffic laws). Charley was fine with pulling an arbitrary example to communicate a concept. I understood that the content of the study was irrelevant and worked purely as a hypothetical construct. I alluded to a non-hypothetical study that came up with a different conclusion based on more data and used it to illustrate a logical weakness in Charley’s post, i.e. that higher traffic tix cited to drivers of a given racial class is prima facia evidence of racial profiling.
I could have used other examples, real or hypothetical to disprove Charley’s reasoning, I just responded in the scenario he raised and refuted it.
No, no. You’re being condescending and snide by being over pedantic and not relating it to the overall point.
Given that, I don’t you quite refuted it (not to mention that i don’t quite consider it quite cricket to consider it a refutation when the point itself is built on shifting sand).
“go ahead, give it a shot. it’s a Yes or No question.”
It’s a yes or no question which can’t be answered without further data. So, not knowing what Bush did, I’m not going to answer it.
By saying that we don’t know what Bush did, of course, I’m not denying that in some way he arranged for some people under him to lose their jobs. But that can be right or wrong depending on the circumstances. And it’s the circumstances which are contested.
Brett: So, not knowing what Bush did, I’m not going to answer it.
I am uncertain how you could claim you don’t know what Bush did.
I understood your assertion that we don’t know if previous administrations haven’t done the same thing: but we know what Bush did: he had his own appointees fired because they were not pursuing investigations against Democratic politicians.
But that can be right or wrong depending on the circumstances. And it’s the circumstances which are contested.
The circumstances don’t appear to be contested: it appears to have been openly acknowledged by Gonzales that the eight he has been specifically questioned about were sacked because they declined to take the direction to investigate Democratic politicians.
And it’s the circumstances which are contested.
methinks he contests too loudly. careful you don’t find yourself having defended the indefensible. what we know already is plenty damning, and it just keeps getting worse and worse every day.
as to precedent for this kind of thing… i’m sure you know what tu quoque means.
Gary,
Charming or otherwise, you have no idea what sort of relationship I have with my friend, whom I harass in only the most friendly way and I intend at some point, of my choosing, to let him know what I’ve been doing so we can have a good laugh over it. I’m (not) sorry if that offends you in some way.
Tully,
There are some very smart people around here. The opinionated Gary I responded to above comes immediately to mind. (I wish I were one of them. None of this is snark, btw.) At any rate, my closing was not to seriously suggest that you shouldn’t enjoy this site, but just to put forth some code words to hint at where I know you from.
“The circumstances don’t appear to be contested: it appears to have been openly acknowledged by Gonzales that the eight he has been specifically questioned about were sacked because they declined to take the direction to investigate Democratic politicians.”
Right. And unless you think that Democratic politicians should be immune from investigation, whether or not it was appropriate to sack prosecutors because they refused direction to investigate Democratic poiticians is dependent on the circumstances.
“And unless you think that Democratic politicians should be immune from investigation, whether or not it was appropriate to sack prosecutors because they refused direction to investigate Democratic poiticians is dependent on the circumstances.”
Umm, no. One can also believe that it is the US Attorney’s decision on whether to bring charges, a decision that should be made free from influence from the Administration, and once the decision is made, it should be respected by all parties. And that does not appear to be the case here.
As evidence that the Administration wanted charges brought where the US Attorneys had determined none were merited, see today’s Seattle Times.
Gwangjun:
By arguing the details of an hypothetical example instead of its underlying point you lead the pack in obtuseness. Why don’t you actually come up with a comment that reflects back on the point under discussion?
How does data restricted to the years of Pres W’s admin provide you with enough of a benchmark to compare him with previous administrations for whom no data is given?
Come on guys, the question ain’t that tough if you are intellectually honest.
Here’s the remedial version: How can you know I am taller than my brother if you are only given data on my height (6’4″) but none about the sibling in question.
I guess the next step is to draw pictures…but that would be worthless because it assumes that the reader actually cares to understand the point.
John Doe: do I say that the study shows anything about being “first”? No. Does Krugman? Does the study? No.
I’m not giving the NYT a dime to read Krugman, who long ago squandered his considerable intellect to become a political faction hack, and Ill take your word that you didn’t say that upthread. But the study itself does indeed say:
The current Bush Republican Administration appears to be the first to have engaged in political profiling.
Clear enough? And that is clearly NOT supported by their so-called “study,” which fails pretty much all the touchstones for validity. They offer ZERO evidence for same, simply allege it.
The study itself is where the comparison to racial-profiling traffic stops begins, as the authors both use it as a comparitive and an examplar for their preferred “solution.” Methinks they set out with their “solution” in hand, seeking to find the problem for it. My friend Pat over at Stubborn Facts (himself a former DOJ atty and state prosecutor with experience in corruption cases) has some further analytic deconstruction showing how truly awful that “study” really is.
The subject of the firings themselves is a separate issue, but I note that when partisan politics becomes involved, some folks treat rumor and allegation as proven fact. I still don’t have any problem with those holding what are political patronage appointments being dismissed by their patron for political reasons. Politics ain’t beanbag, and it’s not illegal. Partisan hatreds won’t make it so.
If someone shows an actual investigation into actual wrongdoing was thereby derailed or averted, or that any of the investigations called for and NOT undertaken were simply completely lacking in evidence of wrongdoing, that’s a different story and something worth examining, even though it STILL would likely not rise to illegality. But we ain’t there yet.
Tully: Krugman, who long ago squandered his considerable intellect to become a political faction hack
That generally codes out to: Krugman is consistently critical of the Bush administration: the only reason anyone could have for being so consistently critical is that he’s a “political faction hack”. He is not: it is not political factioning when the President says that 2+2=5 and Krugman civilly points out that the answer remains 4.
I still don’t have any problem with those holding what are political patronage appointments being dismissed by their patron for political reasons. Politics ain’t beanbag, and it’s not illegal.
In theory at least, however, the law is supposed to be above partisan politics. If a politician has done something criminal, it should be irrelevant how well-connected he is or if he is a member of the party in power. Likewise, if he has done nothing criminal, the mere fact that he is in opposition to the party in power should not be a valid reason for a legal investigation to be launched. John Ashcroft, though a man with many failings, did appear to understand this concept.
In fact, this principle is sufficiently important that, while it would be worth knowing if it has occurred before, it is not the most important thing to know now:
If someone shows an actual investigation into actual wrongdoing was thereby derailed or averted, or that any of the investigations called for and NOT undertaken were simply completely lacking in evidence of wrongdoing
Given your reluctance to examine the evidence that Krugman is still a considerable intellect and that the Bush administration deserves his consistent criticism, I imagine that you are equally reluctant to read Josh Marshall’s well-grounded criticism, and are therefore unaware that your condition has already been fulfilled.
Let’s clear some things up here, for people following the instalanche.
#1. These firings are in not comparable, nor equivalent to the beginning-of-administration blanket removal that happens at the beginning of every new admin. Clinton sacked all the attorneys at the beginning of his term. Bush II did the same. Already. In 2000. This is about mid-term firing of your own prosecutors.
#2: It’s become extremely clear that these Attorneys were fired – clear through the testimony and statements of Republican political officials – in many cases, at least, due to complaints from local Republicans that Democrats weren’t being indicted. Now, I want to ask a question here – does anyone think the George Bush’s own personally selected employees are secretly partisan Democrats looking to protect Democrats from corruption? It’s ridiculous and baseless. They’re all Republicans. The only imaginable reason that a Republican prosecutor would avoid indicting a Democratic politician would be that ***they believed the allegations on the case in question were baseless**.
#3. But, clearly, the Republicans at the White House and in the local areas didn’t care if the allegations were baseless or not. They wanted Democrats indicted to help win elections, knowing full well the media would never delve deep enough into the allegations to figure out innocence or guilt one way or another.
–Recap ended.
#3. Tully, who are you to talk about junk social science? It’s possible that the demographic reasons you suggest may mitigate the apparent *fact* that Democrats are being investigated for corruption at 8 to 1 over Republicans at the state level – or, to clarify, may mitigate the implication of pervasive political persecution behind the fact – but first: that’s speculation, not evidence – where are your facts? How do I know what percentage of cities are controlled by Democrats, or for that matter, that major cities are the only places to obtain corruption convictions and that somehow makes it okay to only convict Democrats? What about state (and municipal) legislatures? No corruption there? Please.
But more importantly, second: whether or not the survey deems to investigate every possible mitigating circumstance doesn’t make it “junk science” – the survey reports a fact, and a disturbing one. It the fact is accurate, it has no further obligations. So back off.
Whoa, missed this upthread:
Tully: The firings may or may not have been strictly political. The hearings by Congress are most assuredly completely political.
For someone who’s claiming that the facts aren’t in about the firings, you’re being awfully cavalier in your assumptions about the hearings. Can you provide concrete factual evidence to justify not just “political”, nor even “completely political” (?!), but “most assuredly completely political”?
If someone shows an actual investigation into actual wrongdoing was thereby derailed or averted, or that any of the investigations called for and NOT undertaken were simply completely lacking in evidence of wrongdoing, that’s a different story and something worth examining, even though it STILL would likely not rise to illegality.
I remarked on this upthread but I’ll reiterate: how is firing someone for investigating one’s own party — or for failing to investigate one’s political opponents — not illegal?
Tully said it, but I’ll say it again:
Hilzoy: John Doe: do I say that the study shows anything about being “first”? No. Does Krugman? Does the study? No.
Does the study? Yes. If you look at the link in your own post [http://www.epluribusmedia.org/columns/2007/20070212_political_profiling.html], you find this text: “The current Bush Republican Administration appears to be the first to have engaged in political profiling.”
It apparently bears repeating: You can’t know whether something is “first” unless you look at what came before. You can’t know whether Tuesday is hotter than Monday if you only know Tuesday’s temperature. You can’t know whether Los Angeles has more people than New York if you only know the population of Los Angeles. Is there anyone who still doesn’t grasp this basic point?
Also, in response to the other criticisms of the study, Hilzoy says: I don’t think it’s wrong at all.
Well, that’s very persuasive, but it needs to be backed up with reasoning and facts, don’t you think? Would you accept this kind of completely unsubstantiated defense of a bogus study purporting to prove the evil of Democrats? Come on. Look at the many criticisms outlined here — http://stubbornfacts.us/politics/partisanship/political_profiling_study_is_fatally_flawed — and tell me with a straight face that you’d just as blithely cite this sort of shoddy work in any other context but the present one (i.e., leveling accusations at the Bush administration).
John Doe, I think you’re missing the point.
For a historian, it will matter whether Bush was the first President to do this, or merely the first President not to get away with it.
What matters in the here and now is not whether Bush was “the first”, but whether we accept that what Bush is doing is wrong – or even, criminal.
If it’s criminal to fire attorneys because they refuse to conduct investigations with the political bias you require of them, then it’s criminal no matter who does it.
And because it is the current President doing it now, it matters more to confirm that this is what he is doing and to stop it, than it does to find out if other Presidents before him did the same thing.
As I point out here in the post cited by Tully earlier, I found, with just an hour of Google searching, SIX Republican elected officials or candidates who were under investigation by the Bush Justice Department during the time period covered by this “study” but who were not included in the data table provided by Professors Shields and Cragan. Just one hour of public domain searcing increased the number of Republicans investigated by 10%. Imagine what one might find with TWO hours of searching, or searching through a more comprehensive news source like Lexis/Nexis.
Anarch… whether something is “completely political” or not is not really capable of being objectively proved with “concrete, factual evidence.” That’s because it depends on the state of mind of the people taking the action. You obviously despise the Bush Administration, so you’re going to continue to believe the firings were political, made to derail some investigations and enhance others. The only way to establish “concretely” that that’s not the case would be to read the minds of the people who made the decision to fire them.
Glasnost… before you again criticize Tully for spouting off “junk science” of his own, go read my analysis, which Tully cited. The “study” does not actually report any “facts” sufficient to support their claim. They missed AT LEAST 6 investigations of Republicans and made numerous other errors which have certainly biased their results. Worst, from an academic standpoint, they utterly fail to describe their methodology which would allow us to review them and determine if they would show what they claim to show.
If somebody issued a study claiming that there were no deer in America, because they went to 367 spots and found no deer there, we’d say they were loony, wouldn’t we? Such a study would be worthless, even though each specific data point was true (there really were no deer at any of those spots).
John Doe: OK. But the claim that the Bush administration is first is tangential to the study’s point.
To recap this post: I was saying that the firing of prosecutors because they declined to accept political orders about things like whether or not to bring charges, whether to wrap up investigations before the election, etc., is wrong.
I then cited Krugman, who makes the very good point that while one part of this story concerns the prosecutors who were pressured, said no, and were axed, another part ought to concern the question whether there were prosecutors who were pressured, bowed to pressure, and were not axed.
Good point, I said.
Krugman cites evidence that USAttorneys investigate seven times as many Democrats as Republicans as evidence that something might be going on. But the study is not his main point, nor is it mine in citing him.
People are now criticizing the study on the grounds that the study said something else that it did not justify — namely, that the Bush admin. “appears to be the first to have engaged in political profiling.” This is not relevant to the study’s actual conclusion, which concerns the numbers. It is not relevant to Krugman’s purpose in citing the study. The study itself is only supporting evidence for Krugman’s larger point, which is that we need to check out the US Attorneys who were not fired to see whether they carried out any politically motivated prosecutions. (Note: this conclusion does not depend on the study; the study just adds support to it.) It is also not relevant to my point in citing Krugman, which was to agree with his conclusion.
So we are talking about the study’s failure to answer a question it did not ask, when that fact does not invalidate the study, and the study is not crucial to Krugman’s main point, or to mine.
I fail to see why this is a big deal.
PatHMV: Anarch… whether something is “completely political” or not is not really capable of being objectively proved with “concrete, factual evidence.”
Then one should be more circumspect in making similar complaints about the political nature of the firings, no?
You obviously despise the Bush Administration, so you’re going to continue to believe the firings were political, made to derail some investigations and enhance others.
I do believe that’s what we call mind-reading around these parts. 10 yards, loss of down.
[It’s also wrong, which is why that sort of thing is frowned upon.]
The only way to establish “concretely” that that’s not the case would be to read the minds of the people who made the decision to fire them.
Ah, the classic dodge: if it can’t be proven with mathematical rigor, it can’t be proven at all, so why bother? Which is precisely why I didn’t ask for “absolute proof” or anything synonymous; I used “concretely” because I was asking for concrete evidence to justify the claim that these firings were “most assuredly completely political” — as in, Congress had no interest whatsoever in the legal or ethical ramifications of the firings but was purely seeking political advantage against the President. Things like a public declaration of same, or a documented history of this Congress’ complete politicization of the judicial process, something like that. It seems reasonable that if one can in good faith claim not just that the hearings are “completely political”, but “most assuredly completely political”, such evidence shouldn’t be hard to come by.
I’m not going to hold my breath, btw, but — contrary to your confident, yet erroneous, claim above — I’m certainly amenable to being convinced.
Jesurgislac: I’ve pointed out several other criticisms of the study; I haven’t limited myself to the criticism that the study unjustifiably claims that Bush is the “first” (although this should be a good clue to the discerning reader that mischief is afoot, as it proves that the study’s authors are either too stupid to know what the word “first” means or too dishonest to care).
In any event, other correct criticisms of the study are: Doesn’t specify its methodology for ascertaining how many investigations are in existence; counts investigations of Democrats that actually began under Clinton; apparently counted news stories that mention who was subpoenaed, but doesn’t even consider the fact that witnesses are often subpoenaed (as opposed to only targets); omits many investigations of Republican officials.
On top of that, the study makes absolutely no attempt to discover whether 1) the investigations of Democrats were justified, or 2) any Republican instances of corruption were left uninvestigated. After all, if US Attorneys investigate all significant local corruption cases that involve violations of federal law, and it just happens that most local cases involve Democratic officials, then a disproportionate number of Democratic investigations is precisely what you’d expect. Indeed, if local Democrats do take bribes more often, etc., the real bias would be if US Attorneys tried to rig the numbers so that they investigated an equal number of Republicans and Democrats.
So I took a few names at random from the list of local officials and tried to Google them.
First was Abe Beltran of Colton, California. Oops, turns out that he pleaded guilty to accepting bribes. And it turns out that that link shows that two more people on the list (Karl Gaytan and Jim Grimsby of Coltron, California) either pleaded guilty or were found guilty of accepting bribes. Maybe that wasn’t a witchhunt after all.
Next one I googled: Xochilt Ruvalcaba of Southgate, California. One document shows that the investigation here began with the LA district attorney (and moved to the FBI only later). An LA Times story describes some of what Ruvalcaba and the other people from Southgate, California (also on the list) did:
Hmmm, maybe that wasn’t a witchhunt either.
Anyway, that’s all I have time for. Feel free to use Google yourself (www.google.com) to try to figure out what went on in the rest of the cases. As for the flip side of the equation, you might also try to dig up cases of local officials who were Republican, who broke federal laws in a similar manner, but who weren’t investigated federally.
Without that kind of factual investigation, neither you nor the study’s authors have any idea whether the Bush administration has been unfairly targeting local Democratic officials. Do you admit that much?
Hilzoy, in my post at Stubborn Facts, I deliberately left the criticism of the “study” cited by Krugman about the “first administration” claim to last. It’s the most minor point. As I’ve already pointed out, the study is deeply flawed for the purpose for which Krugman cited it. It simply is not reliable about its fundamental point. That’s the big deal. An hour of fact-checking found SIX data points that the authors omitted, a 10% error. More time would almost certainly have found more omissions, and the other biases Tully and I have noted provide still more reasons to disregard the study as worthless.
PatHMV — it’s darned odd that even after those flaws have been repeatedly pointed out (both here and through links to more comprehensive essays elsewhere), Hilzoy’s 12:40 post 1) takes it for granted that there is a problem with the overall “numbers,” and 2) assumes that the only flaw alleged with the study is whether it claimed that the Bush administration was “first” to engage in political witchhunts. Darned odd, I say.
Pat,
First Tully unexpectedly turns up, and now you. Things should be a lot more fun around here. I know you both from elsewhere, pre-Stubborn Facts. My id is secret for now for the reason noted upthread.
PS: Bernard – so you were up in arms when Clinton et al fired all those US attorneys en masse?
livermoron,
No. I was not. I quote nell:
How many times does someone in this thread have to explain that U.S. Attorneys are political appointees, that it is absolutely routine for an incoming administration to replace them, whether en masse or in a leisurely fashion?
Still, I’m sure you’ll get credit for memorizing and repeating the talking point correctly.
I did not take it for granted that there was a problem with the numbers. I did take it for granted that it had not established that Bush was the first person to do this. I then noted that that was not its point.
I will also add: it would take a lot of errors to get around a 7:1 disparity.
Clarification: You seem to take it for granted, and indeed still do, that the numbers are wrong, i.e., 1) that this study really does show a 7:1 disparity (when it does no such thing), and 2) that any disparity that does exist is problematic (which may or may not be true, depending on facts of which you seem to be entirely ignorant).
The (reported) 7:1 number applies only to local officials. The overall ratio is closer to 4:1. I make no comment on the accuracy of those numbers, only that those are the numbers put forth by the study.
I’m not sure how useful the study is. It seems that the facts of the individual cases, of which I have very little knowledge, are what matter.
“I will also add: it would take a lot of errors to get around a 7:1 disparity.”
Or a lot of crooked Democrats. Too bad they didn’t bother to find out which it was.
Hilzoy, you’re really being careless with that 7:1 figure. As hairshirthedonist points out, that’s only the local officials, when state officials are omitted. It would be an odd sort of bias to show up against the lower-level politicos but not the higher, state-level ones. When you look at ALL elected officials and candidates, or at least all the ones found by the study, and the ratio is 4.45 to 1. Add in the 6 Republicans and 1 Democrat I found omitted by the study (with just one hour of work), and the ratio falls to 4.09 to 1.
You continue to assume that the numbers of the study have any validity at all, despite the fact that I have demonstrated both specific omissions and the potential for systemic bias. When the basis for the raw data is destroyed, the numbers become meaningless. There’s nothing to “get around.”
As hairshirthedonist points out, that’s only the local officials, when state officials are omitted.
oh fer chrissakes, Krugman himself makes that point. read the last sentence of Hilzoy what quoted.
Hilzoy: I fail to see why this is a big deal.
it’s all they’ve got.
My suggestion would be to forget about the study. If the study were never done, would there be nothing to talk about? I don’t think it’s this study that has made the firings an issue.
I also have a question. What does this all mean in the end? If there’s nothing illegal about the allegations being made about the admins conduct, and assuming the allegations are all true, what then? Is it simply another reason to dislike the Bush admin, perhaps to the point to think that it may be one of the worst ever, or is there something more? I haven’t read a clear statement on the implications of all of this.
I agree with all the skeptics of the study – there cannot possibly that few corrupt Republican officials in this country.
jesurgislac, Krugman’s become a hack. I won’t waste the off-topic electrons here showing it, but he is. He demonstrates hackdom just by citing a study he has to know is bogus. If he’s not aware the study’s junk, then I take back anything nice I said about his intellect–he’s either stupid, or a hack, or a stupid hack. Pick ’em. You wanna worship him as a fellow traveler, go ahead. I don’t kneel in that church, not for either party.
Tully, who are you to talk about junk social science?
Someone with extensive experience in designing and analyzing valid studies who knows blatant junk when he sees it. Feel free to attempt to defend the study on its academic merits–it has none. QED.
Krugman cites evidence that USAttorneys investigate seven times as many Democrats as Republicans as evidence that something might be going on. But the study is not his main point, nor is it mine in citing him.
Hilzoy, if his “evidence” is so blatantly bogus, how does it support his point? It’s not evidence of anything but the study author’s [a] incompetence, or [b] intent to decieve, or [c] both. Without his “evidence” what is his point, anyway? What else does he offer that we know for fact? Stripped of semantics and reduced to objective statements?
As I pointed out upthread, the numbers in the study for federal & statewide officials show NO disparity from random selection, even though they were apparently hand-picked. The local numbers show 7 to 1, but we already know the “research” itself is horribly flawed at best, in data acquisition, methodology, selection bias, etc. At all levels–I picked out bad data by eye without ever hitting Google at all, just glancing through the data tables. Before I even got to the (complete lack of) required methodology descriptions and such. Were I a peer-review reader and that crossed my slushpile, it would’ve been immediately roundfiled as utter junk.
As I noted upthread, even starting with the assumption that Democrats and Republicans are equally inclined to be corrupt, you could still easily end up federally investigating and prosecuting more Dems than Reps without any partisan selection bias by USA’s at all, simply based on the demographic distribution of locally elected Dems and Reps in relation to metro size and proximity to USA’s offices.
Meaning we know absolutely nothing from the “study” of any relevance at all to the subject of the firings, as the study is completely worthless from any empirical standpoint. The firings themselves are certainly worthy of discussion, but the study is junk and Krugman puts himself on record with it for some guilt by association. Far as I’m concerned that makes his opinion worth the same as any partisan wing-ranter’s, left or right, namely zilch. Nothin’ but emo-angst dump. If he had any relevant and verifiable facts in his pay-per-view column, I’m open to hearing them.
Tully,
“As I noted upthread, even starting with the assumption that Democrats and Republicans are equally inclined to be corrupt, you could still easily end up federally investigating and prosecuting more Dems than Reps without any partisan selection bias by USA’s at all, simply based on the demographic distribution of locally elected Dems and Reps in relation to metro size and proximity to USA’s offices.”
Where to begin?
a. US attorneys as a group cover the entirety of every state — there is no place which is not subject to the jurisdiction of a US Attorney. Your objection based upon the “metro size and proximity to the US Attorney’s office” is just silly. Are you seriously suggesting that if there were criminal events going on in Las Cruses, NM and Inglesias decided it was too far from Albequerque to investigate, that would be normal and expected conduct for a US Attorney?
b. The fact that Democrats tend to cluster in large metro areas means there are far more, not less, Republican local officials than Democrats, if each municipality has roughly the same number of elected officials. Certainly a city of 100,000 would not have 100 times the number of elected officials as a town of 1,000.
c. Ultimately, any discussion of this study is a distraction from the real issue here — this Administration wanted the US Attorneys to ignore their proper role, and instead prosecute innocent Democrats and protect guilty Republicans. To their credit, at least some US Attorneys did not, and were fired for it.
Dantheman, Tully and I are both well aware of that no part of the U.S. is outside the jurisdiction of some U.S. Attorney. That’s not the point. Where the prosecutor’s office is physically located does indeed impact what they investigate. Even the best investigations are sometimes only sparked by gossip. There’s not as much personal interaction with folks in the hinterland, so the FBI and the prosecutors are less likely to have sources and snitches tipping them off to improper behavior.
More noticeably, small town embezzlement and corruption tends to involve dollar amounts measured in the thousands, not millions. A U.S. Attorney is unlikely to bring the full resources of the FBI to bear on a crime involving $10,000, while a crime involving $1 million will certainly get his attention. It’s primarily the large urban (mostly Democratic) areas which have that kind of money at stake.
The critique of the “study” is highly relevant, because Krugman charged that it was a “bigger scandal” than the 8 fired prosecutors. Krugman claimed that the STUDY was the “real issue” here, not the 8 individual prosecutors. So if you think the study is a distraction, blame Krugman and Hilzoy for bringing it up.
Also, note that even according to the “study,” Democratic local officials outnumber Republican ones by a noticeable amount.
First of all, I have yet to see argument against Krugman’s cited study that isn’t bull****. I’m waiting for someone to correct me.
We have Tully pointing out that a 7:1 ratio of investigated/indicted Democrats to indicted Republicans doesn’t prove that the Bush administration was witch hunting. Fine. But that doesn’t make the study inaccurate. The purpose of the study was to determine the ratio of investigated Republicans to investigated Democrats. Period. It did so. Period. It doesn’t prove anything about anyone’s motivation or related unethical/illegal behavior. Not the purpose.
Then we have Tully not liking that there was no published metholodogy. So? So you think you have objectively disproved the conclusions, because you don’t know how they did it? Further more, I see the Chi-square calculations right there in Appendix D. What more methodology, exactly, do you want?
Lastly, we have unfounded allegations as follows: but we already know the “research” itself is horribly flawed at best, in data acquisition, methodology, selection bias, etc.. Excuse me? You know this how? Would you like to come up with some examples, please? Or should I just assume you’re making it up out of literally thin air?
Or are all three of those allegations related to PatHMV’s unintentionally hilarious declaration that she’s already found six Republican officials indicted who weren’t mentioned in the survey? PatHMV, are you bleeding kidding me? Do you know what a sample is? Do you know what samples do – survey a random grouping of individuals in the population, rather than surveying literally every person in it? You could find 1000 officials that weren’t in the sample. That’s why it’s a sample. It’s not a systematic compilation of every indicted official in the country. For Pete’s sake.
So, if anyone comes up with a legitimate, evidenced reason why the sample demonstrating – period – a 7:1 ratio of investigated/indicted local Democrats to Republican officials is factually incorrect – we’re still waiting. In the meantime, it seems to be rightwing pushback (i.e., serial dishonesty) period. Although, to give Tully the benefit of the doubt, he might just be a psychological contrarian with a serious problem sticking to the subject – which is not whether or not you like the survey, but whether you have any specific evidence that its conclusions are factually incorrect.
Second, this survey is a bogus red herring. Subtract it out, and it makes not an iota of difference to the meat already on the table – Gonzales firing eight US attorneys who refused to indict – frame – innocent Democratic politicans solely because indictments make Democrats look bad.
The survey stuff is just icing. What we have on the table is, at minimum, a huge scandal, and depending on what we find about Menendez’s bogus indictment last year, potentially Watergate-level infamy.
“Gonzales firing eight US attorneys who refused to indict – frame – innocent Democratic politicans solely because indictments make Democrats look bad.”
Um, you know that they’re innocent? Really? How do you know this?
Glasnost’s comment is particularly stupid, as is shown by the contrast between these two statements:
Do you know what a sample is? Do you know what samples do – survey a random grouping of individuals in the population, rather than surveying literally every person in it? You could find 1000 officials that weren’t in the sample. That’s why it’s a sample. It’s not a systematic compilation of every indicted official in the country.
And:
Then we have Tully not liking that there was no published metholodogy. So? So you think you have objectively disproved the conclusions, because you don’t know how they did it?
Anyone who has even the slightest familiarity with social science will perceive the stupidity here: If the study is supposed to be based on a random sample, then it’s pretty dang important what the methodology was. Specifically, how do you get a random sample of “local-officials-indicted-or-possibly-subpoenaed-as-a-witness-in-corruption-investigations”? The authors of the study are clearly dishonest — as shown by their claim to have proven that the Bush administration is the “first” to do [something] even without looking at any pre-Bush evidence. Why the heck should anyone trust that they picked a random sample (even if such a thing is possible here)? If they weren’t trying to create a list of all corruption investigations, then who says they weren’t just cherry-picking the sample?
Brett: Um, you know that they’re innocent? Really? How do you know this?
Well, all of them are legitimately entitled to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, yes?
And, it does seem likely that when a Republican-appointee (a Bush-appointee) prosecutor declines to indict a Democratic politician, it means the case against the politician is shaky to non-existent. Especially, when the attorney’s job is on the line and it has been made clear to them: indict or get fired. If there was any kind of case, surely these Bush appointees would have indicted.
Brett, you have come across as reasonably fair-minded, so far. This comment rather spoils that effect.
Um, Glasnot, did you bother to read my post at Stubborn Facts? Or for that matter the study itself? Where do you find a claim by the authors that they were studying a sample, rather than the entire population? The heading on their data source table reads: 375 Candidates & Elected Public Officials (All Offices) Investigated by the Bush Justice Department Identified by Political Party Affiliation 2001 thru 2006.
No reference to “Sample” there. And any randomized study ABSOLUTELY requires a disclosure of the methodology used to select the sample. Did they pick at random the names of 375 elected officials, and then check to see whether they were investigated or not? Did they compile a list of all “investigated” officials and then random select from that population? Did they pick a random assortment of 10,000 officials (and candidates!) and then discard them until they had 375 who had been “investigated”? No, it’s clear from their study that their figures claim to be ALL the elected officials investigated by the Bush Administration.
As for sticking to the subject, the subject of this post by Hilzoy was this study dug up and touted by Paul Krugman as the “bigger” problem. And the study is bogus. If you don’t want to see that, fine. But first back up your assertions that the authors were making a “random sample” and tell me how and from where they drew that random sample.
As for sticking to the subject, the subject of this post by Hilzoy was this study dug up and touted by Paul Krugman as the “bigger” problem.
Well, actually, no…but carry on.
As for sticking to the subject, the subject of this post by Hilzoy was this study dug up and touted by Paul Krugman as the “bigger” problem.
err… no. that’s what y’all keep saying it should be. but, it’s not.
though… maybe if you can prove Jamil Hussein wrote the study you’re so concerned about, you could prove that not only is every A.O.K. with the D.O.J. but with Iraq, too.
Sorry, I must have gotten confused when Hilzoy wrote: “Paul Krugman raises another crucial point:” Pardon me for focusing on just one of the “crucial points” made in the post.
Sorry, I must have gotten confused when Hilzoy wrote: “Paul Krugman raises another crucial point:”
Yes, you did get confused. Or, at least, your writing is confused.
Usually, when someone uses the term “another”, it’s used as a butressing point for a larger, overall point. In no way can that be confused as the subject of the post, particularly since the “point” is introduced in the last third of the post.
Such sloppy construction sorta implies that the underlying rhetoric structure is equally sloppy, and I don’t think you want us to think that.
Well, I tend to give relatively equal weight to “crucial” points. If they were of lesser importance, not really needed, than they wouldn’t be “crucial.”
This is a problem with motive speculation when there isn’t strong evidence–if you speculate on a motive that turns out to not be very strong, it distracts from an attempt to point out the initial problem.
It is odd that Bush chose to fire these people in mid-term.
That is worth investigation.
After reading through the thread, I’m not at all convinced that the reason these people were fired was because they weren’t sufficiently investigating Democrats, nor am I at all convinced that Democrats are being particularly unfairly investigated (the idea that Democrats tend to have power in big cities and thus when corrupt [and whatever the ‘natural’ rate of corruption is] have the ability to make make a bigger splash on the local corruption level than corrupt Republicans who tend to be important in smaller towns amkes a good deal of sense).
That shouldn’t detract attention from the fact that the firings are odd and wanting of an explanation.
Just because this motive isn’t as explanatory as it seemed on the first pass doesn’t mean that the action of firing these people is from a pure motive.
Sorry, I must have gotten confused when Hilzoy wrote: “Paul Krugman raises another crucial point:”
Uh, the crucial point wasn’t the study, but, if these 8 were pressured to put the heat on democrats, refused and were fired for it, isn’t it possible that other U.S. Attys were pressured and didn’t refuse to put the heat on democrats? He then points to the study as “evidence” (which, obviously doesn’t prove anything) that such a hypothesis is true.
SH, sure looks bad to me.
I have to agree with Sebastian, for the most part; I don’t understand this focus on almost insisting that the cause of the firings must have been, or likely was, in each case, insufficient willingness to prosecute Democrats.
There’s only specific evidence indicating that in one case, that of McKay of Seattle; in the other cases, it so far seems likely that there were other (political) motivations for pushing out the Attorneys.
This fact in no way indicates any lack of malfeasance on the part of the DOJ leadership, or the White House, so why we’re winding up with people focusing on “if these 8 were pressured to put the heat on democrats” when there’s no evidence at all to support that point (it could be true, but for now, 1 =/ 8), I don’t know.
Besides, anyone who thinks that Gonzalez and his minions would limit themselves to only one political reason for pushing out U.S. Attorneys they’d like to replace to be able to give the slot to another up-and-comer, is being deeply unimaginative, IMO. 🙂
Or better, JMM‘s central post.
I’m not at all convinced that the reason these people were fired was because they weren’t sufficiently investigating Democrats
Sebastian,
At Volokh, anderson provides this link to a story in the Seattle Times about one of the fired USA’s. It sounds convincing to me, but maybe my biases interfere. What do you think?
Gary- I think Iglesias in New Mexico fits in that list as well.
oops. rilkefan beat me to the punch.
PatHMV:
Where do you find a claim by the authors that they were studying a sample, rather than the entire population?
Right here
We compare political profiling to racial profiling by presenting the results (January 2001 through December 2006) of the U.S. Attorneys’ federal investigation and/or indictment of 375 elected officials. The distribution of party affiliation of the sample is compared to the available normative data.
Fish in a flipping barrel.
I await your apology and retraction, Pat.
As for the methodology of selecting the random sample, I tell you what, I wouldn’t mind finding that out myself. Perhaps someone should try emailing the authors and politely asking them for it, eh?
I read your website, Pat. It’s a collection of speculation and gripes. None of the others, to your credit, are as wildly off the mark as this one, but to talk around here as if you’ve somehow “debunked” the study is ludicrous. What you’ve done is listed a bunch of complaints about what you think the study should have done that in no way disprove the conclusions of the data it presents.
I don’t know if the random sampling they took might have been in some way biased. You don’t know either. So, because I can’t prove that the sample was bias free, you think you can declare it ‘junk science?’. Give me a bleeding break. You don’t know the methodology of newspaper presidential polls. And even if you knew the announced metholodogy, you don’t know if they’re lyyyyying. Unless you can come up with some evidence that the sample was biased, you’ve…. got….. nothing.
And Ugh beats me to Iglesias.
Gary, you’re (a) being too literal and (b) missing D.N.M. WRT (a), there’s no functional difference between pressure to indict Dems and pressure not to indict Reps, and so that a firing falls into the latter category doesn’t really say anything positive for the Admin., nor does it really refute the ‘one true motive’ thesis.
That said, I think you’d have to call the story developing. People who think that the particular motive of one-sided corruption lies behind these firings will likely be proven right, at the end of the day: this is why the government keeps changing stories. More simply: they’re covering up because they did something wrong.
In point of fact, as has been much reported, Harriet Miers initially inquired of Gonzalez as to whether all 90+ U. S. Attorneys could be fired and replaced at the beginning of Bush’s second term; Rove said it wasn’t practical, and suggested a smaller list.
This, along with the other reasons the fired Attorneys were apparently fired for, would seem to clearly demonstrate that there were a number of reasons these firings were engaged in; not just the single reason of not prosecuting Democrats.
(I should have mentioned Iglesias, as well as McKay, though.)
Carol Lam, for instance, prosecuted Duke Cunningham. Paul K. Charlton investigated Republicans Jim Kolbe and Rick Renzi. Bud Cummins investigated Governor Roy Blunt. Daniel C. Bogden investigated Governor Jim Gibbons.
It seems that investigating Republicans was as bad for your job health as not investigating Democrats with no grounds.
Margaret Chiara, on the other hand, didn’t ask for the death penalty, and Charlton also had a fight with Washington about it. Coincidence?
“missing D.N.M.”
?
“Gary- I think Iglesias in New Mexico fits in that list as well.”
Yeah, I already posted about that, before your comment crossed mine.
Sorry, and multiply pwned at that.
“You don’t know the methodology of newspaper presidential polls.”
Well, so long as one avoids reading about them; the methods are publically available on the web, as a rule, and even (usually) linked to from the newspaper’s site.
signed,
guy who has done a lot of polling
“People who think that the particular motive of one-sided corruption lies behind these firings will likely be proven right, at the end of the day”
Well, of course; I’m not sure why this is addressed to me.
Pointing out that the corruption is almost certainly — all the indications so far point to it — for far more widespread reasons than the single one of not prosecuting enough Democrats, is the opposite of saying it isn’t corruption!
Gary, I don’t think anyone at all is saying that ‘failure to indict Dems’ is the one true motive. Refutation of this is beating a straw man. One sided corruption is the proffered motive, and ‘failure to indict Dems’ is sometimes used as a shorthand.
“Gary, I don’t think anyone at all is saying that ‘failure to indict Dems’ is the one true motive.”
I’m perfectly willing to believe that that’s not what people are thinking, but it’s what some are saying.
Example: Dantheman, 3:05 p.m.: “Ultimately, any discussion of this study is a distraction from the real issue here — this Administration wanted the US Attorneys to ignore their proper role, and instead prosecute innocent Democrats and protect guilty Republicans. To their credit, at least some US Attorneys did not, and were fired for it.”
I agree with the first phrase, but the rest clearly states only that sole reason for the firings; I think that’s myopic and almost certainly wrong.
If it’s just “shorthand,” I don’t think it’s helpful for people to be arguing in a way that leaves out all the other motivations and reasons for the purge, when that spread of corrupt reasons is clearly relevant. I think that “shorthand” is misleading, and will lead to problems when someone sucessfully points out that it fails as an explanation in some cases. That’s an argument no one should be bothering with, let alone setting themselves up for. IMO.
That’s all.
Yes, Glasnost, I saw that word the first time I read the study. It does not say “random sample.” In context, it can easily be read to be referring simply to the data they studied. Had they been referring to a statistical sample there, they would have said, “we sampled X number of elected officials, whose overall partisan make-up reflected the nationally known partisan distribution of ___%.
As for e-mailing the authors, you are welcome to. It’s obvious to me from the language they use and the manner in which they have “released” the study that they aim at furthering a partisan agenda, not exploring real facts. In political science and sociological research, indeed in any rigorous academic research, it is the responsibility of the researcher to discuss these issues upfront, not the responsibility of the reader to assume things or inquire further as to their fundamental methodology.
will lead to problems
Only if people are excessively literal. A decided danger given all our new friends . . .
Well, so long as one avoids reading about them; the methods are publically available on the web, as a rule, and even (usually) linked to from the newspaper’s site.
Okay. Perhaps a bridge too far. But you basically take the newspaper’s word on faith that the methodology they actually used is the methodology that they say they used. You don’t ask to see the source code for the software that was used to randomly dial.
The metaphor here is that not knowing the sample selection methodology when looking at a study done by university professors with no obvious reason to be dishonest, and who have obvious competent backgrounds in their field, may be something you’d like to know, but not knowing it doesn’t make the study “junk science”. It’s ridiculous, spurious, and politically motivated to say so. You don’t even know that that methodology hasn’t been made available to others. It simply isn’t on the link for epluribusmedia’s web presentation.
Just coming up with reasons off the top of your head why some study somewhere might have a flawed sample and then saying “so this study is liiiiies” is a joke. You haven’t proven a thing. You’ve made accusations that have neither been refuted nor vindicated. Making accusations is really easy.
Of course, someone could argue in the reverse vein, that just because the Bush DoJ has investigated 7 times as many local Democrats as Republicans, isn’t proof that they did it for partisan reasons. By itself.
No, for proof of that we need to turn to the eight DoJ firings that just happened…
Yes, Glasnost, I saw that word the first time I read the study. It does not say “random sample.” In context, it can easily be read to be referring simply to the data they studied. Had they been referring to a statistical sample there, they would have said, “we sampled X number of elected officials, whose overall partisan make-up reflected the nationally known partisan distribution of ___%.
Pat…
My anger is almost spent. I’m trying not to be more nasty than neccesary here. But you really need to slow down before you say foolish things.
We compare political profiling to racial profiling by presenting the results (January 2001 through December 2006) of the U.S. Attorneys’ federal investigation and/or indictment of 375 elected officials. The distribution of party affiliation of the sample is compared to the available normative data (50% Dem, 41% GOP, and 9% Ind.).
You found “missing” investigations and claimed that it somehow debunked the study.
I pointed out the obvious fact that it was a sample, not a population.
You asked me where I got the idea that it was a sample. I quoted the weblink saying just that.
Now you say, if it was really a sample, they would have given the total N (#) of elected officials, and stated that it matched the national distribu… oh wait, they did that too.
It makes me wonder – is this really Pat? Is this someone spoofing him? Making his arguments look even more ridiculous than they really are?
It’s obvious to me from the language they use and the manner in which they have “released” the study that they aim at furthering a partisan agenda, not exploring real facts. In political science and sociological research, indeed in any rigorous academic research, it is the responsibility of the researcher to discuss these issues upfront, not the responsibility of the reader to assume things or inquire further as to their fundamental methodology.
Oh, I see. Because they released their findings in a manner that suggests they don’t like President Bush, they must be dishonest liars. Thanks for clearing that right up. Additional snark here self-edited.
Well, I give up. You’ve got your mind made up, glasnost, and the facts matter not. They did not “do that too.” Their statement does not say that the sample is “comparable” to the normative data. They compared the investigations they identified to the national sample. The sentence about the 50% to 41% normative make-up is designed to establish that there is not a 7 to 1 disparity between Democratic and Republican officials. You are reading the words but not understanding what they are saying.
If you’re so convinced they did a random sample, why not e-mail them yourself and ask them? Or just point me to a source telling me what the TOTAL number of all political officials and candidates under investigation in this country. The number 375 strikes me as in the right order of magnitude.
The metaphor here is that not knowing the sample selection methodology when looking at a study done by university professors with no obvious reason to be dishonest, and who have obvious competent backgrounds in their field,
1. They are professors of communications. This makes them competent to study federal prosecutions . . . how?
2. No obvious reason to be dishonest: Well, we’ve already established beyond a shadow of a doubt that these particular professors are willing to lie about their results (i.e., by claiming that they’ve proved that Bush is the “first” to politicize prosecutions, when they didn’t even study anything pre-Bush). If they lie through their teeth about one thing, I chalk them up as untrustworthy. Why be so gullible?
As for the methodology of selecting the random sample, I tell you what, I wouldn’t mind finding that out myself.
Correction: The authors never say “random” sample. Why are you defending the authors by making a claim that even THEY are not dishonest enough to make?
We compare political profiling to racial profiling by presenting the results (January 2001 through December 2006) of the U.S. Attorneys’ federal investigation and/or indictment of 375 elected officials. The distribution of party affiliation of the sample is compared to the available normative data (50% Dem, 41% GOP, and 9% Ind.).
You seem to be reading this to mean: “We took some sort of sample that matched the political demographics of the overall population.” It obviously means nothing of the sort. The authors say that they’re comparing the 375 people under investigation to the 50/41 split. It doesn’t even make sense to claim, as you do, that the authors collected the sample of 375 by matching the 50-Dem/41-Repub split — the whole freaking point of this bogus “study” is that the 375 don’t match the 50-Dem/41-Repub split.
Instead, the comparison to which the authors are referring occurs in (for example) Table 2 here, where they compare the number of Democrats and Republicans under investigation to the 50/41 split in the population of local officials.
Obviously, this comparison of the final results does absolutely nothing to make the original sample random.
In short, you have absolutely zero support for claiming that the sample was randomly selected. Given that the authors themselves, dishonest as they can be, don’t even pretend that the sample was random, why should anyone believe your desperate and post hoc scramble?
The metaphor here is that not knowing the sample selection methodology when looking at a study done by university professors with no obvious reason to be dishonest, and who have obvious competent backgrounds in their field,
1. They are professors of communications. This makes them competent to study federal prosecutions . . . how?
2. No obvious reason to be dishonest: Well, we’ve already established beyond a shadow of a doubt that these particular professors are willing to lie about their results (i.e., by claiming that they’ve proved that Bush is the “first” to politicize prosecutions, when they didn’t even study anything pre-Bush). If they lie through their teeth about one thing, I chalk them up as untrustworthy. Why be so gullible?
As for the methodology of selecting the random sample, I tell you what, I wouldn’t mind finding that out myself.
Correction: The authors never say “random” sample. Why are you defending the authors by making a claim that even THEY are not dishonest enough to make?
We compare political profiling to racial profiling by presenting the results (January 2001 through December 2006) of the U.S. Attorneys’ federal investigation and/or indictment of 375 elected officials. The distribution of party affiliation of the sample is compared to the available normative data (50% Dem, 41% GOP, and 9% Ind.).
You seem to be reading this to mean: “We took some sort of sample that matched the political demographics of the overall population.” It obviously means nothing of the sort. The authors say that they’re comparing the 375 people under investigation to the 50/41 split. It doesn’t even make sense to claim, as you do, that the authors collected the sample of 375 by matching the 50-Dem/41-Repub split — the whole freaking point of this bogus “study” is that the 375 don’t match the 50-Dem/41-Repub split.
Instead, the comparison to which the authors are referring occurs in (for example) Table 2 here, where they compare the number of Democrats and Republicans under investigation to the 50/41 split in the population of local officials.
Obviously, this comparison of the final results does absolutely nothing to make the original sample random.
In short, you have absolutely zero support for claiming that the sample was randomly selected. Given that the authors themselves, dishonest as they can be, don’t even pretend that the sample was random, why should anyone believe your desperate and post hoc scramble?
“the subject of this post by Hilzoy was this study dug up and touted by Paul Krugman as the “bigger” problem.”
No. This was not the subject of this post. This was the subject of Tom M’s Instapost linking here, but it was not the subject of my post.
The subject of my post was the attorney firing scandal itself. The ‘crucial issue’ Krugman brought up was not the study; it was the question: since we know that there were US Attorneys who were pressured and then fired for not yielding, it stands to reason that there were US Attorneys who were pressured and yielded and were not fired. That is: that some US Attorneys carried out politically motivated investigations and/or prosecutions under pressure.
Please do not attribute to me points I did not make.
1. They are professors of communications. This makes them competent to study federal prosecutions . . . how?
Quite a bit, if you’re familiar with academic studies. That is, if you’re honest about it.
I tell you what, Pat and John. You’re right: I don’t know that the sample was a random sample. Yeah. I’m assuming that the authors, whatever method they used, didn’t deliberately skip Republicans when they went looking. On the other hand, it’s definitely represented up front as a sample, and not a comprehensive list, so, as said from the beginning, finding 8 officials not listed doesn’t have a whole lot of relevance, if you’re looking at a sample. All that matters is that, whatever method they used, Republicans weren’t skipped.
The local official subtotal of investigated/indicted officials is 262 to 037. The p value for this is less than .0001. It only has to be .05 to be statistically significant. In other words, that ratio would have to be unrepresentative of the population by *massive* amounts for the study to be substantively wrong.
So, you’ve found 7 Republicans and 1 Democrat that weren’t listed? Do you think that there are, oh, 200 more investigated Republicans, waiting to be discovered, that the study’s authors somehow skipped? If you found 200, and there were not another 200 Democratic investigations also then the study’s conclusions would be substantively wrong. And then, and only then, do you have a case for arguing that the study’s authors had any reason at all to act dishonestly. And you sure don’t have, yet again, any evidence that their sampling methods were improper.
1. They are professors of communications. This makes them competent to study federal prosecutions . . . how?
Um, professors of communications – statistical surveys are a pretty large part of communications – their chi-square calculations are posted, and how many in 100 random Americans know how to do those? One? Two?
If you’re so convinced they did a random sample, why not e-mail them yourself and ask them? Or just point me to a source telling me what the TOTAL number of all political officials and candidates under investigation in this country. The number 375 strikes me as in the right order of magnitude.
It seems like the right order of magnitude to me, too. So there probably aren’t another 100 investigated Republicans, waiting to be found, you say? So, the study’s conclusions were substantively correct?
So, in conclusion, like I said, a bunch of bomb-throwing and smoke-blowing to detract from the very probable truth
that the Bush DoJ has investigated.. about 7 times as many local Democrats and Republicans?
Glasnost, for the last time, in the context in which the word “sample” is used, it is not at all clear that it means what you claim it means. It reads to me as “the sample of investigations we were able to find,” rather than an intentionally created subset of the total. The titles on the data source tables support this conclusion, as they do not use the word “sample” at all.
Today alone I’ve found 3 or 4 more Republicans investigated but not named in the study. Are there 200 more? I have no idea. What is the bar you’d like me to cross before you accept that the study is worthless? Do you admit that the 7-to-1 claim is false, and are you now resorting to a claim that there must be some bias?
Not being privy to the professors’ methodology (which is normally and routinely disclosed as part of actual academic investigations), I have no way of knowing whether the other biases I described actually impacted their results. Failing to define “investigation” in any way beyond “some reporter said it” by itself renders the study meaningless. There is no legal category of “under investigation.”
A more rigorous study might focus on indictments, which are public knowledge and are very clearly defined. Counting “investigations” is mostly counting characterizations made by reporters and pundits, not actions by U.S. Attorneys.
But hey, it backs up your biases, so you’re convinced. Revel in it.
Hilzoy, fair enough, but in the comments you’ve defended, incorrectly, the study (denying that it claimed that the Bush administration was the “first” to do this), and you did cite it to bolster your argument. It would be incumbent on you, then, to either defend the study or admit that it’s flawed and unreliable to support your primary point.
More cases to keep in mind for the next fundraiser for the victims of BVA (Bush-induced Voluntary Autism).
Um, professors of communications – statistical surveys are a pretty large part of communications – their chi-square calculations are posted, and how many in 100 random Americans know how to do those?
Um, I’m not questioning their calculations. I’m questioning their competence at collecting data on federal prosecutions. Did these “scholars” winnow out a sample from TRAC’s database of federal prosecutions? Or would they even be aware of such a database? Their reference to “local beat reporters” makes one think that they just searched news stories. Which might seem fitting to simple-minded communications professors, but is not a good way to conduct a study like this, and it’s certainly not a way to get a random sampling of federal investigations. Garbage in, garbage out.
Speaking of databases, let’s not guess about the 375 number being a reasonable estimate of the total number of prosecutions, OK? DOJ’s Public Integrity Section files a report to Congress every year on the public corruption prosecutions undertaken that year (and in previous years). Here’s the report for 2005. If you scroll down to page 53, you’ll see that between 2001 and 2005, there were between 1087 and 1212 prosecutions each year (that’s the sum of federal, state, and local). It’s actually unclear whether this represents new prosecutions initiated in each year or the total number of open prosecutions (some of which obviously last for more than one year).
In any event, there have been many more prosecutions under Bush than 375 — up to 6,000 or so. In which case it’s pretty doggone important how these so-called scholars came up with the sample.
More Investigations of Democrat Evil-doers: How is this a bad thing?
Slow blogging day today–swamped with work trying to get ready for a meeting tomorrow. Its hard to compete with the left where it concerns outrage. I simply don’t know how lefty-bloggers survive past their thirties in such a perpetual state…
I’m questioning their competence at collecting data on federal prosecutions.
and your job title is ?
As a gentle cough all around, the argument from authority has both uses and limits.
Amen. If I can’t criticize the scholars’ lack of knowledge of legal databases and their crappy data collection because I’m not a professor of communications, then who is “cleek” to question my arguments?
If you don’t want an infinite regress of ad hominems, cleek, try addressing matters of substance. If you can.
who is “cleek” to question my arguments?
Someone who comments as “John Doe” really has no right to put the assumed name of another commenter in quotes.
He/she is cleek. You are John Doe. No need to make an issue of it.
“…then who is ‘cleek’ to question my arguments?”
Someone who has been posting here for something on the order of two years, and thus providing a long record we can all decide how much or little credibility to give to, since you ask.
You? Under a week.
Hey, you asked.
Power of argument, particularly as noted via logic and citations of verifiable facts, usually triumphs around here, or any other fair site, FWIW.
Um, I’m not questioning their calculations. I’m questioning their competence at collecting data on federal prosecutions. Did these “scholars” winnow out a sample from TRAC’s database of federal prosecutions? Or would they even be aware of such a database? Their reference to “local beat reporters” makes one think that they just searched news stories. Which might seem fitting to simple-minded communications professors, but is not a good way to conduct a study like this, and it’s certainly not a way to get a random sampling of federal investigations. Garbage in, garbage out.
Actually, I think this might be a better description of everyone HERE than the professors (me included).
This looks more and more like a study of how the MEDIA is reporting on these issues. Which makes the professors neither simple minded nor incompetent–they’re studying exactly what their competence lies in…no more, no less. That’s of interest certainly (I’d say of academic interest, but….).
I think everyone is reading a bit more of this than is warranted.
OK, Mr. Farber, but that’s really a pretty meaningless criterion. Just in this one thread, I’ve offered evidence about the existence of legal databases; the DOJ’s annual reports on public corruption prosecutions; and the exact nature of a few of the prosecutions included in the study. I’m one of the few people who seems to have actually looked at the study (which is why I don’t make embarrassing errors like claiming that the study had a “random” sample, or that it did not claim anything about Bush having been the “first” to engage in political prosecutions).
Cleek, on the other hand, has offered nothing but snarky questions and remarks. So if he/she has a two year history of equally non-substantive posts, that doesn’t really say very much, now does it?
“So if he/she has a two year history of equally non-substantive posts, that doesn’t really say very much, now does it?”
Perhaps not. Probably you win the argument. Yay, you.
Gee, no one got my Walter Brennan joke, back when we were on helots.
John Doe, thanks for the link to the Public Integrity Section report. I should have gone there myself. Those stats on page 50 and following are of people who have been formally charged, by either indictment or bill of information, and of people who have been convicted. There is nobody “under investigation” included in those figures.
Note that the corruption figures in the DOJ report include non-elected officials as well as elected. In 2005, there were 96 state officials and 309 local officials charged. Almost all the federal cases involved non-elected officials. These figures include both local assemblymen and mayors as well as the non-elected officials who work for them, cabinet secretaries, chiefs of staff, accountants, bookkeepers, treasurers, contract review officials, etc. That’s a much larger pool of folks than the elected officials, so the total of elected officials and candidates is going to be lower than the totals for “local corruption” given in the report.
John Doe, please stop by Stubborn Facts and comment over there if you have a moment. We’re always looking for commenters with sharp analytical minds and some common sense.
We’re always looking for commenters with sharp analytical minds and some common sense.
Also known as: people who agree with me.
John, that’s an interesting report and all. Hoorah. No, really, nice job. However, as Pat helpfully points out, it’s not really relevant to what we’re discussing – investigations, and indictments. First of all, they don’t have party affiliation in the stats in the report, secondly Pat’s point about both elected and unelected officials, thirdly, only indictments and convictions are listed here. So, no, actually, the professors couldn’t have used this for “investigations”. And the fact that the DoJ’s public stats don’t mention “investigations” is sort of convenient, isn’t it? Most importantly, it’s not helpful or credible as a piece of evidence to suggest that the pool of investigated elected officials is much larger than the sample. So there’s your embarrassing mistake for the day. You can lose the smirk now.
Now, rather self-evidently, just because, as Pat says, There is no legal category of “under investigation.”, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an administrative category of exactly that type. We can all agree that Congress should subpoena those administrative records pretty darn quickly, shouldn’t they? How many local elected officials does DoJ have a file on, from which parties? That would clear up whether the good profs are right very quickly.
Pat also says: it is not at all clear that it means what you claim it means. It reads to me as “the sample of investigations we were able to find,” rather than an intentionally created subset of the total.
At this point, I don’t know that anymore, either. John is right that I thought that first and don’t see a strong suggestion of it now. However, this is also very unlikely to be important, because:
Pat:
Today alone I’ve found 3 or 4 more Republicans investigated but not named in the study. Are there 200 more? I have no idea.
Come on. If you had to bet a loved one’s life on the answer, where would you come down? Because another 200 (150-200) is what it would take for the study’s conclusions to be substantively wrong. The 3 or 4 you found do.. not… matter… for a survey which never claimed to have found them all to begin with. Whether or not it was “random” as a randomized subset of a larger controlled population of data, it’s claimed to be a “sample”. And I, heart on my sleeve here, believe in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, that it wasn’t cherry-picked. That would be very obviously stupid and self-defeating.
What is the bar you’d like me to cross before you accept that the study is worthless?
Reasonable evidence, or compelling and suggestive logic that the conclusions – that a statistically significantly larger number of Democratic local officials than Republican ones have been investigated by the Bush DoJ – are substantively wrong.
Not griping about how much work they showed. Not hating on their choice of websites to put up their findings, or their choice of extraneous words. Not that you can think of ways in which some person doing some study on this would have some (unknown) level of bias, considering that any accidential bias would have to be mind-blowingly enormous to wash away a disparity of 7 to 1.
After all this twisting in the wind, someone come up and state clearly: “I think the Bush Admin DoJ really investigated as many, or about as many (let’s say, within 50%) Republican local elected officials as Democratic ones”.
I’m standing up here and saying I believe the study’s conclusions. Even if genuinely unplanned, systemic bias factors are eventually discovered, the ratio might fluctuate, but not very much. You can’t even bring yourself to directly say, “I think the underlying conclusions are wrong”. By all means, go for it.
This looks more and more like a study of how the MEDIA is reporting on these issues.
Gwang, this sounds a lot like Pat’s:
Counting “investigations” is mostly counting characterizations made by reporters and pundits, not actions by U.S. Attorneys.
This is, no offense, pretty unlikely. How many stories are run that the DoJ is investigating someone, without hearing from the DoJ, or checking with the DoJ, to see if the DoJ is actually investigating them. If there were press stories about DoJ investigating 290 Local dems and 35 local Republicans, to claim the DoJ isn’t involved in that very strange discrepancy is … very charitable. Very, very, very charitable.
I’m sick and tired of seeing recent statistical evidence – usually the best or most complete information on record – dismissed out of hand, and its creators villified, assumed away as liars and quacks, because they can’t jump through an infinite number of post-hoc hoops put forth by Republican spear-carriers. So, there’s another way of getting me to change my mind: quote me a better study. Maybe one with a larger total data set. I’m all ears.
The same thing went down with the Lancet.
The authors of the study are clearly dishonest — as shown by their claim to have proven that the Bush administration is the “first” to do [something] even without looking at any pre-Bush evidence.
I would not like to say that the author of the phrase above (“John Doe”) or the others who made a similar argument were “clearly dishonest,” so I won’t. But they are clearly wrong.
The “smoking gun” in the original report, as quoted numerous times above, is that, as JD himself quotes: “The current Bush Republican Administration appears to be the first to have engaged in political profiling.”
“appears to be . . .”
Anyone with any familiarity with social science research – or the English language, I am tempted to say – should recognize this phrasing as indicating, “We think this is true but haven’t bothered to research it, because it’s not important.”
Condemning such a statement on the grounds that the authors haven’t bothered to research it is indicative of, in the kindest possible light, an inability to comprehend what one is reading.
In the worst possible light? . . . well, I said I wouldn’t call anyone “clearly dishonest.”
Dr Ngo, this thread’s been running for two days. During that time, a small number of people who either don’t often comment here or who have never commented here before, have been suggesting that it matters whether or not Bush/Cheney is the first administration with this kind of bias in US Attorney’s investigating politicians: matters to an extent that if it is not true that Bush is the first one, this somehow casts doubt on proven facts (firing of Bush’s own appointees mid-term) and likely allegations (that this was being done because they were not prepared to investigate Democratic politicians against whom there was no evidence of wrong-doing).
Each time this suggestion (that Bush is not the first, and that this matters) has been brought up, it has been refuted quite thoroughly, by several different people, from Hilzoy to myself.
None of these new commenters have paid attention to the refutation, but continue to buzz about Bush possibly not being the first, as if that mattered.
At this point, I’d say that bad faith is proved.
Since no-one has mentioned this, I guess it’s incumbent upon me to note that the first clause of the op-ed — which is not the actual article, since this also appears to have escaped everyone’s notice — is the following:
Our ongoing study of the Bush Justice Department (to be published in 2008)…
A closer read shows that: a) it’s an ongoing, longitudinal study from which the data has yet to be fully collected; that b) this material was…
…presented the preliminary data through August 2004 at the Southern Speech Communication Annual meeting in April 2005 in Baton Rouge and as a refereed panel paper with data through December 2004 at the November 2005 annual meeting of the National Communication Association.
so presumably the full data set including methodology is available somewhere, having been refereed — although I’ll grant that I have no idea how rigorous the refereeing of the National Communication Association is, and neither do you — and that c) the authors’ claims are implicitly to be verified in their actual article rather than in the précis they provided in the op-ed.
None of this is to say that the op-ed, as it stands, is dispositive; it clearly isn’t. And hell, maybe they really did just pull the first 375 cases out of a Lexis-Nexis search, in which case this study really would be “junk science”. Those claiming to have “read the study” simply haven’t, however, and those claiming “dishonesty” should reduce their wild-eyed claims to something more tenable like “as-yet unjustified”. Oh, and they should also stop impugning the literacy and integrity of others, but that should really go without saying.
[I should also note that I tried emailing the authors of the article but something screwed up in my registration and I couldn’t get through. Should anyone else succeed, I’d appreciate hearing the response.]
Addendum:
Oh, and they should also stop impugning the literacy and integrity of others, but that should really go without saying.
This should really go for everyone on this thread, myself included.
If you don’t want an infinite regress of ad hominems, cleek, try addressing matters of substance. If you can.
see, i’m not the one whinging:
They are professors of communications. This makes them competent to study federal prosecutions . . . how
so, please, tell us your job title, so that we can all decide if you’re qualified to criticize them, or anybody, on anything, ever. or, you could admit that the issue of job description in this matter is yet another red herring, and has no bearing at all here as a matter of substance.
then who is “cleek” to question my arguments?
cleek is a programmer.
but it was you, “John Doe”, who brought up the issue of job title vs. competence, and seems determined to use it as a way to discredit the study you apparently seem to think is the key to this whole issue.
that’s about as far away from a “matter of substance” as you can get.
and, i apologize for two similar posts in a row.
cleek also can rip a mean guitar riff, once his cat got everything worked out
my cat really is the key to it all.
Glasnost:
Most importantly, it’s not helpful or credible as a piece of evidence to suggest that the pool of investigated elected officials is much larger than the sample. So there’s your embarrassing mistake for the day. You can lose the smirk now.
The DOJ report that I linked to showed around 1,100 to 1,200 prosecutions every year. I’d assume that the pool of investigations would be even larger than the number of prosecutions. Yet you interpret this to mean that the “pool of investigated elected officials” could be close to 375? Wow. Do the math there: 1,100 per year is more than 375 per a 5-year-period.
“The current Bush Republican Administration appears to be the first to have engaged in political profiling.”
OK, they use the phrase “appears to be.” So what? Given that nothing pre-Bush was even purportedly studied, there’s still no basis whatsoever for claiming that Bush “appears to be” anything.
Jesurgislac: There’s been a long discussion of points other than the one you seem hung up on, i.e., whether Bush was “first.” Of all the criticisms that can be made of the so-called “study,” that doesn’t even make the top 10. Why are you still pretending that it’s the only criticism that’s been made?
Cleek: it was you, “John Doe”, who brought up the issue of job title vs. competence, and seems determined to use it as a way to discredit the study you apparently seem to think is the key to this whole issue.
Not true. Please read before posting. I do not use their job titles to infer their incompetence. I point to their obvious incompetence (i.e., searching news stories by some completely unspecified method and claiming to have found a “sample” of federal prosecutions). From their incompetent choice of methodology, I conclude that these professors of communications weren’t even aware of the existence of legal databases.
From that, I also conclude that it’s silly (as glasnost suggested) to assume that the study is just fine because the professors have “obvious competent backgrounds.” No, they don’t, and their “study” shows it.
But all this is a red herring — I’d never have even mentioned their qualifications had glasnost not tried to play the qualifications trump card in a completely ridiculous and unjustified manner, as if anyone who is a professor of anything is therefore “obvious[ly] competent” to investigate something entirely outside their field.
Glasnost, I agree it’s unlikely that the authors intentionally cherry-picked their stories, which is why I went to such lengths to explain why a variety of forms of selection bias could have a significant influence on their results.
Go read a few of the stories cited by the authors as their sources, and see for yourself what the DOJ had to say. Take the Baltimore example I gave in my post. The DOJ’s response was “no comment.” Why? Because the prosecution should never comment about on-going investigations, and US DOJ policy is not to do so.
You seem prepared to admit that the extent of the study may well be flawed, that the number is not 7 to 1 as claimed, but instead wish to reclassify its basic point as being that there is some bias. Well, that’s not the claim the authors make. They claim it’s 7 to 1, not “some.” Their conclusion is defeated if the ratio is only 6 to 1, or 5 to 1. Your conclusion of bias may or may not be correct, but it’s not made by the study. You’ve asked me to disprove not the study but your own conclusion of some bias.
Still, let’s narrow it down some to see whether it’s possible to do that. How do you define “under investigation”? Are each one of the Baltimore city council members “under investigation” because they each got a subpoena for some records? Can I count investigations begun during the Clinton Administration but continued during the Bush Administration? If they subpoena the records of a bunch of local contractors and the press assumes that means they are investigating the local city council, do I count those, and whom do I count, the mayor, the entire city council, who? Do I count only investigations confirmed by the U.S. Attorney? Give me the criteria which will convince you, laid out ahead of time, and I just may gather the data to do it.
That’s why laying out the methodology is so important. In science, you lay out your experimental criteria, methodology, and definition of success before you do the experiment. By analyzing those factors, we can begin to determine whether the experiment produced valuable results or merely confirmed what the experimenters wanted to hear.
Anarch, as for the “preliminary” nature of this study, all we have to go on is what the authors put on their website. They chose to release it, unfinished, and it is now being used to support political charges. I didn’t go digging through unreleased studies and bring them to light, their study was cited by a prominent, partisan columnist. If it’s going to be used now, then it must be supported now.
If nothing else I have to award points for stamina all around.
I’m still wondering why Republicans aren’t running with this study to show how much more corrupt Demorcrats are, weird.
Not true.
i’m willing to accept that you didn’t actually mean to imply that, but your words certainly suggest that’s what you meant.
Please read before posting.
please make sure your writing says what you intend.
And a pretty good read to boot! Although I’d issue demerits for excessive sarcasm and personal attacks. If everyone ulitimately kisses and makes, those can be remediated.
I always find it interesting that these sort of protracted discussions evolve (or devolve) into finer and finer hair-splitting, and in parallel, become more and more heated. Someone should study that.
Pretend my last comment immediately followed OCSteve’s. I’m slow.
I always find it interesting that these sort of protracted discussions evolve (or devolve) into finer and finer hair-splitting, and in parallel, become more and more heated. Someone should study that.
I definitely notice the hair splitting on this one. When it gets down to parsing verbiage/methodology that is at least somewhat ambiguous there is no way for one or the other to really ‘win’ (whatever that means in the context of blog comments).
People dig in and set their feet but it’s not really going anywhere. I usually give up at that point (thus the comment about points for stamina).
Anyway – Hilzoy has a fresh post up on the topic without Krugman or this study involved. Suggestion: Retreat to your corners then come out swinging there 🙂
Anarch: presumably the full data set including methodology is available somewhere, having been refereed — although I’ll grant that I have no idea how rigorous the refereeing of the National Communication Association is, and neither do you — and that c) the authors’ claims are implicitly to be verified in their actual article rather than in the précis they provided in the op-ed.
OK, maybe it’s the case that in a year or two, we’ll all find out that the authors really did look at a database of all 6,000 or 7,000 prosecutions, that they really did select a sample of 375 randomly, and that the 7:1 ratio in local prosecutions really does exist. To be sure, that would still leave open the question whether there was any bias in the process at all. Perhaps those large urban cities controlled by Democrats really are more likely to experience corruption of the level that deserves federal investigation. [Note: the authors don’t even seem to be aware of this possibility.]
But we’re nowhere near that point yet. All that the “study” consists of now is: An op-ed, and a few PDF files that merely list 375 “investigations” with zero explanation of how they were chosen.
It’s embarrassing that Krugman would cite and rely on this as “statistical evidence” of anything.
Which leads to a broader point: Academics probably shouldn’t write regular op-ed columns (or blog, for that matter). They all too often end up sacrificing intellectual standards for the sake of making a polemical point. There’s absolutely no way that Krugman, in one of his scholarly works, would claim that “statistical evidence” proved something, when the evidence consisted merely of an op-ed backed up by a few charts with zero explanation of methodology. Krugman the academic knows better than that. But Krugman the columnist will cite anything and everything that supports a polemical point, no matter how preliminary or unsubstantiated.
[Unrelated hint for Cleek: Someone else brought up the issue of “competence” first. I was merely responding to it.]
I hope this thread somehow magically disappears soon, but I will add my two cents worth anyway.
It seems this thread has devolved from the subject of the post to a critique of a study, as if showing the study is flawed means there really is no problem.
Somehow this reminds me of the whole uproar over the allegedly forged memos aired by Rather. They became the focus, rather than the substance of his total report.
Of course that is an easy way to avoid looking at the reality. Find a flaw, no matter how trivial and focus on that. Magically, everything else becomes suspect.
I, for one, am glad hilzoy posted a new post on this whole affair.
It seems this thread has devolved from the subject of the post to a critique of a study, as if showing the study is flawed means there really is no problem.
You’re reading something that’s never been said or implied. I’ll lay it out for you:
1. The attorney firings look like a problem, at least in a few cases, albeit one of very limited scope.
2. If this study is right, however, there’s a massive and nationwide problem of politically-partisan investigations by federal prosecutors.
Do you see why it might be important to know whether 2 is true, even if that doesn’t affect 1?
JM, sometimes misdirection is all you’ve got.
Here’s the only thing I could find on the web that discussed the Cragan/Shields methodology. It’s by someone who actually called up Shields:
If this account is right, the study is garbage. Again, both Krugman and Hilzoy should be embarrassed for blithely citing it as evidence without even attempting to figure out what methodology was used.
This looks more and more like a study of how the MEDIA is reporting on these issues.
Gwang, this sounds a lot like Pat’s:
Counting “investigations” is mostly counting characterizations made by reporters and pundits, not actions by U.S. Attorneys.
This is, no offense, pretty unlikely.
For communications professors??? Hardly. That’s bread and butter, meat and potatoes, tenure-granting research there.
This is not to say that these resarchers AREN’T stepping beyond their competence here. But as a former communications academic, calling this study garbage is unwarranted–it’s the generalization beyond the scope of the media that seems to be garbage.
People dig in and set their feet but it’s not really going anywhere.
Oh, I don’t know. Pat agreeing that the data set is unlikely to have been intentionally cherry-picked (or at least, shouldn’t be assumed so without specific evidence) gives me room to consider this a civil debate.
Anyway – Hilzoy has a fresh post up on the topic without Krugman or this study involved.
Yeah, but it looks like we mostly agree about that one. Thus, not so much fun. I like debate. Heated debate, even.
The DOJ report that I linked to showed around 1,100 to 1,200 prosecutions every year. I’d assume that the pool of investigations would be even larger than the number of prosecutions.
DOJ report = elected & unelected officials
Data set = elected officials
1100 = tells us little about subset, “elected officials”
Thanks = anyway
This is horrific statistical analysis. The p value is .0001 only if Democrat/Republican is the only possible independent variable. Which it clearly is not. Analyzing it like that is the kind of statistical nonsense that gets people to believe that Saggitarians are 38% more likely to have broken arms than people from other astrological signs.
This is pretty far afield, glasnost, but what’s your reason for thinking that in a 5-year period where around 6,000 officials were actually prosecuted by the federal government, the number of investigated officials who were elected (rather than appointed) is anywhere near 375? The pool of investigated people has an absolute minimum at the number of prosecutions, and is probably much larger. What makes you think that only around 6% of officials — who are in a high enough position to be worth bribing — are “elected”?
Jesurgislac: At this point, I’d say that bad faith is proved.
Oh, I know, Jes, but sometimes when a particular point (in this case a linguistic one) has not yet been made, I feel obliged to make it anyway. In the faint hope it might make a difference.
Although I’m an ex-Christian, I suppose I still tend to believe in the possibility of redemption, even of those who are clearly wrong wrong wrong.
Up to a point. Beyond which, I begin to suspect the Sin Against The Holy Spirit. No cookies for them. Forever.
So I shall probably not be responding to John Doe, johnt, Brett and the rest of that mob hereafter. Pity, that.
John Doe… On that last point, I would suggest that it’s not always the elected official who is in a high enough position to be worth bribing. Very often it is the staff or the contract officer who have the biggest potential to influence contract awards and so forth. Is it cheaper and safer to bribe the one guy writing the bid specs (so they will be written in a way which makes your company the only real choice) or a majority of the aldermen who will be voting to award the contract?
Glasnost, I too enjoy a good vigorous debate. I think you’re as wrong and biased as I’m sure you think I am, but you debate civilly and stick with it, and I appreciate that. Wrong as you are, you actually engage in argument rather than contradiction.
Wrong as you are, you actually engage in argument rather than contradiction.
No he doesn’t.
300
300
Dammit!
Jesurgislac and dr ngo: Your comments beggar belief. Let me refresh your memory:
1. I make a comment pointing out several problems with the study, only one of which is the fact that it spuriously claims to have shown anything about whether Bush is “first.”
2. Hilzoy responds only on the “first” point (wrongly suggesting that the study didn’t make any such claim), and not at all on the other points.
3. Jesurgislac responds to me by pointing out that the real question isn’t whether Bush was “first.”
4. I specifically responded to Jesurgislac on this point. I said: “I’ve pointed out several other criticisms of the study; I haven’t limited myself to the criticism that the study unjustifiably claims that Bush is the ‘first.'”
5. Pat also points out the same thing: “Hilzoy, in my post at Stubborn Facts, I deliberately left the criticism of the ‘study’ cited by Krugman about the ‘first administration’ claim to last. It’s the most minor point.”
6. I point out yet again that Hilzoy quite unjustifiably assumed that the “only flaw alleged with the study is whether it claimed that the Bush administration was ‘first’ to engage in political witchhunts.”
By now, even the most inattentive reader might have realized that we critics of the “study” have been complaining about a whole boatload of things other than the issue of whether Bush was “first.”
Yet even after all of that, Jesurgislac parachutes in and pretends yet again that the only criticism at issue is whether the study properly claimed that Bush was the “first.”:
None of these new commenters have paid attention to the refutation, but continue to buzz about Bush possibly not being the first, as if that mattered.
Nobody has “continued to buzz” about this issue, except insofar as I pointed out that it is a telling example of either stupidity or dishonesty (take your pick).
Yet Jesurgislac claims that “bad faith” on my part has been “proved”! She is the one who ignores other people’s posts, pretends that their only criticism is one that they themselves repeatedly describe as “minor,” and refuses to acknowledge the existence of their more significant criticisms. And we’re the ones arguing in bad faith? What
What amazing chutzpah, that should have said.
John Doe | March 13, 2007 at 12:59 AM : it’s bullshit to put out a study claiming that the Bush administration is the “first” to do something when the study didn’t even look at anything pre-Bush
John Doe | March 13, 2007 at 12:13 PM: It apparently bears repeating: You can’t know whether something is “first” unless you look at what came before. You can’t know whether Tuesday is hotter than Monday if you only know Tuesday’s temperature. You can’t know whether Los Angeles has more people than New York if you only know the population of Los Angeles. Is there anyone who still doesn’t grasp this basic point?
John Doe | March 13, 2007 at 01:06 PM: I haven’t limited myself to the criticism that the study unjustifiably claims that Bush is the “first” (although this should be a good clue to the discerning reader that mischief is afoot, as it proves that the study’s authors are either too stupid to know what the word “first” means or too dishonest to care).
John Doe | March 13, 2007 at 05:10 PM: The authors of the study are clearly dishonest — as shown by their claim to have proven that the Bush administration is the “first” to do [something] even without looking at any pre-Bush evidence.
John Doe | March 13, 2007 at 08:22 PM: Well, we’ve already established beyond a shadow of a doubt that these particular professors are willing to lie about their results (i.e., by claiming that they’ve proved that Bush is the “first” to politicize prosecutions, when they didn’t even study anything pre-Bush).
John Doe | March 13, 2007 at 11:39 PM : I’m one of the few people who seems to have actually looked at the study (which is why I don’t make embarrassing errors like claiming that the study had a “random” sample, or that it did not claim anything about Bush having been the “first” to engage in political prosecutions).
John Doe | March 14, 2007 at 09:02 AM to me: There’s been a long discussion of points other than the one you seem hung up on, i.e., whether Bush was “first.” Of all the criticisms that can be made of the so-called “study,” that doesn’t even make the top 10. Why are you still pretending that it’s the only criticism that’s been made?
John Doe | March 14, 2007 at 01:40 PM: Nobody has “continued to buzz” about this issue, except insofar as I pointed out that it is a telling example of either stupidity or dishonesty (take your pick).
And we’re the ones arguing in bad faith?
Yes.
John Doe | March 13, 2007 at 12:59 AM : it’s bullshit to put out a study claiming that the Bush administration is the “first” to do something when the study didn’t even look at anything pre-Bush
John Doe | March 13, 2007 at 12:13 PM: It apparently bears repeating: You can’t know whether something is “first” unless you look at what came before. You can’t know whether Tuesday is hotter than Monday if you only know Tuesday’s temperature. You can’t know whether Los Angeles has more people than New York if you only know the population of Los Angeles. Is there anyone who still doesn’t grasp this basic point?
John Doe | March 13, 2007 at 01:06 PM: I haven’t limited myself to the criticism that the study unjustifiably claims that Bush is the “first” (although this should be a good clue to the discerning reader that mischief is afoot, as it proves that the study’s authors are either too stupid to know what the word “first” means or too dishonest to care).
John Doe | March 13, 2007 at 05:10 PM: The authors of the study are clearly dishonest — as shown by their claim to have proven that the Bush administration is the “first” to do [something] even without looking at any pre-Bush evidence.
John Doe | March 13, 2007 at 08:22 PM: Well, we’ve already established beyond a shadow of a doubt that these particular professors are willing to lie about their results (i.e., by claiming that they’ve proved that Bush is the “first” to politicize prosecutions, when they didn’t even study anything pre-Bush).
John Doe | March 13, 2007 at 11:39 PM : I’m one of the few people who seems to have actually looked at the study (which is why I don’t make embarrassing errors like claiming that the study had a “random” sample, or that it did not claim anything about Bush having been the “first” to engage in political prosecutions).
John Doe | March 14, 2007 at 09:02 AM to me: There’s been a long discussion of points other than the one you seem hung up on, i.e., whether Bush was “first.” Of all the criticisms that can be made of the so-called “study,” that doesn’t even make the top 10. Why are you still pretending that it’s the only criticism that’s been made?
John Doe | March 14, 2007 at 01:40 PM: Nobody has “continued to buzz” about this issue, except insofar as I pointed out that it is a telling example of either stupidity or dishonesty (take your pick).
And we’re the ones arguing in bad faith?
Yes.
This comment to apologize for the double post gives me the opportunity to note that John Doe wins the amazing chutzpah award of the night (though not the mensch award of the day) and to add that I am glad to be off to Belgium on holiday tomorrow. With any luck, once I’m back online on my usual basis, this crowd of wingnuts will have drifted away again.
Also, maybe Bush will have been impeached. I’ll hope for it.
Anyone want chocolate? Or would they rather have beer? Belgian chocolate and Belgian beer are two of the good things of this earth.
Apologies for the double post.
Belgian Beer! Hmmm Goulden Carolus!
Oddly enough, you don’t seem to have read the posts that you quoted. Viz:
There’s been a long discussion of points other than the one you seem hung up on, i.e., whether Bush was “first.” Of all the criticisms that can be made of the so-called “study,” that doesn’t even make the top 10. Why are you still pretending that it’s the only criticism that’s been made?
Indeed.
And this is exactly correct:
“Nobody has ‘continued to buzz’ about this issue, except insofar as I pointed out that it is a telling example of either stupidity or dishonesty (take your pick).”
Neither you nor Hilzoy nor anyone else has a good answer to this.
To the contrary, the only point that you and Hilzoy have made is that even if the study wrongly claims that Bush is the “first,” that doesn’t (in and of itself) disprove the rest of the study, nor does it prove anything about the attorney firings.
That’s all fine and dandy. I don’t disagree with that.
But at the same time, the fact that the authors are willing to make a partisan accusation that can be disproved just by reading the rest of the page doesn’t speak well for the reliability of the study. If they are so untrustworthy as to easily-checkable matters, why should anyone trust their research on points that are less easily checked? Any rational person would be suspicious of a study if the author announced, “Based on my study that focuses exclusively on Ohio, I think Ohio has a higher rate of [whatever] than Oregon.”
Not only have you not “refuted” this point, you haven’t even tried.
Jes,
Belgian beer for me, too. I prefer the fruit lambics.
So now the hair-splitting is not about the study, but who said what about the study. But I think it’s about over, although I thought that this morning.
Beer for me. Thanks. (Although I’m lucky enough to live outside of Philadelphia, which I know has quite a few Belgian bars. I’ve heard it’s about the best city for those who love Belgian beer, but I don’t know that to be true. I did a quick study that showed Philadelphia had 7 times as many Belgian bars as the city with the next highest total.)
hairshirthedonist,
Philly also had the late and lamented Cuvee Notredame, which had wonderful Belgian cuisine.
‘Tis kind of amusing to watch some make a big deal of something, have it debunked, and then whine that someone paid enough attention to debunk it and therefore the debunker must be saying something else.
I have addressed only the bogus study, which is Crap with a capital C. If anything claimed in the study is for real, it’s not because the study showed it to be so.
And for the record, I’ve been reading here for quite a long time, I just don’t usually bother to comment unless it’s to address total BS being touted as reality.
Yeah, John, some folks think that “refutation” consists of saying “IS NOT!” repeatedly. Pfui. Another reason I don’t comment here much–arguing with True Believers of either wing bores the hell out of me (which must make me a saint by now, having had all that hell bored right out).
If you’re ordering beer, you really need a fridge that launches.
Darn: I saw that Gary had commented on this thread, and thought: oh. my. god. Perfect storm. Unstoppable cannonball, immovable object. Gary vs. the study fiends!!!
What a disappointment 😉
Saw that, Gary. I’m resisting as it would put me into permanent sofa spud-dom…or maybe I just wanna build my own with a better distance-guaging remote….
“What a disappointment ;)”
I’m more in a sit back and have a beer, and some popcorn, mood, I’m afraid.
Besides, the Belgians really do make some excellent beers.
My life is otherwise much happier by ignoring the whole this-study debate; there’s no shortage of actual news, and analysis.
Besides, I’m contemplating whether I should write a long long post reviewing the very first season of Mission Impossible.
You know, important stuff.
Belgian Beer! Hmmm Goulden Carolus!
Lol, my spouse spent years complaining how hard it is to find it in the Netherlands (though in Dutch you should write ‘gouden’) – only to find that our little liquershop at the corner of our square has a room filled with special beers like the Gouden Carolus 😉
I go to Brussels regularly, my MIL lives there, but I cherish the Peking Duck above all else. Since the Marks and Sparks retreated with their food section there is NO Chinese in the Netherlands where you can eat it properly 🙁
This is pretty far afield, glasnost, but what’s your reason for thinking that in a 5-year period where around 6,000 officials were actually prosecuted by the federal government, the number of investigated officials who were elected (rather than appointed) is anywhere near 375?
I’ve said this more than once now, John, and Pat brought it up himself.
Your figures from the DoJ report include both elected and unelected officials. The study in question is explicitly limited to elected officials. Your figure of “6000” includes a larger set of officials than is being investigated by the study. We don’t know how many elected officials were indicted by DoJ.
Not that more is needed, but on top of that,
you yourself admitted in your first post that it’s not clear if all those figures stand for new investigations.
If you cut out federal and state officials, and look at local ones, which is where the 7:1 ratio comes from, you’ll see that there were only about 1400 indictments of both elected and unelected officials during the Bush Admin to date.
I don’t know that 375 investigations represents all or most of the investigations of local officials under Bush DoJ. It simply seemed plausible, and I had no reason to discount it. Your contrary numbers do not clearly enough represent what we’re talking about to convince me that it is implausible now.
I’ll have to concede you whatever further points you wish to make.
Pat, a final point.
You seem prepared to admit that the extent of the study may well be flawed, that the number is not 7 to 1 as claimed, but instead wish to reclassify its basic point as being that there is some bias. Well, that’s not the claim the authors make. They claim it’s 7 to 1, not “some.” Their conclusion is defeated if the ratio is only 6 to 1, or 5 to 1. Your conclusion of bias may or may not be correct, but it’s not made by the study. You’ve asked me to disprove not the study but your own conclusion of some bias.
Of course, without knowing the methodology, I can’t rule out with certainty that some bias factors – in the sample selection could possibly.
My problem with your whole point of view and PoV is not that you brought up ways in which the sample could possibly be flawed, but that you prevented your concerns as definitive. You treated and (and, to some extent, continue to treat) the study as certainly flawed, and you don’t know that it is so.
To be more specific, your link on Instapundit leads hundreds of thousands of people to willfully and without cause blow the concept of bias off completely. A study showing 7-1 bias? Oh, wait. Here’s some speculation as to some things that might be wrong. Ergo, the authors are quacks and the study is baseless. Ergo, nothing to see here.
The Lancet is a picture-perfect example. Anyone with half a brain knows that the official Iraqi government counts were way understated, but trashing the cluster selection method of a survey suggesting 600K deaths lets people pretend that the Iraqi government’s pulled-out-of-thin-air numbers are the real thing, when they’re really off by orders of magnitude, and unscientific in more wildly obvious way than the point of comparison.
I don’t know beyond certainty that the study ‘s methodology isn’t flawed. But you don’t know that it is flawed. And you act like you do. We both think it’s very likely that there is relevant, correct information from the study as follows – in one form or another, that the Bush Admin is probably investigating more local democrats than republicans. No one here thinks any biases sort of outright falsification could bring 7:1 down to something close to even. The most important finding of the study – and I’m paraphrasing their specific statement – was that the Admin investigates more Dem than Repub local officials, to a statistically significant extent. 7 to 1 is a more specific accounting of that fundamental point.
You lead people away from that fundamental point. Findings that extreme are very unlikely to be entirely the result of accidental bias. That’s my belief. I’m sticking to it.
Glasnost, my final point, responding to yours.
As to misleading people, Paul Krugman’s column is read by many more people than my little blog. For that matter, Obsidian Wings and this post by Hilzoy have probably been read by far more people than read my post. Both Krugman and Hilzoy used this study as conclusive proof of a massive bias against Democrats. I felt compelled to shed a little light on that subject, and I didn’t notice anybody who found the report supportive of their own political positions being overly worried about misleading the public with shoddy “scholarship.” Krguman and others seemed only to happy to try to bolster their claims against the Bush Administration with a little academic authority.
As to the study itself, I do not by any stretch concede what you call its “fundamental point,” which is a much lesser claim than that made by its authors. You are wrong when you say “no one here things any biases sort of outright falsification could bring 7:1 down to something close to even.” I do think that. I said that I felt that 375 was in the right order of magnitude, meaning that I agree it is more than 100 and less than 1000. There’s plenty of room in that less than 1000 to either find a couple hundred overlooked Republicans (the study found no “investigations” of elected officials in 8 states, something I find exceedingly unlikely). In another hour of work yesterday, I found 3 or 4 more Republican elected officials who were investigated but not included in the study, bringing the total up to 11, with just 2 hours work. I think there’s also a reasonable possibility that scrutinizing the 375 cases listed would remove some of the Democrats from the list, too. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the entire Baltimore City Council was “under investigation” simply because they all received a subpoena for some of their records.
As for the definitive nature of my criticism, it is warranted. My suspicion about their “sampling” method was confirmed by the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who e-mailed Shields. Beyond that, I will reiterate that the burden of establishing methodology is on the persons conducting it. Had they disclosed the methodology, then it might be my burden to show how any flaws affected it. But they’ve put slanderous accusations out there, claiming to be scientific about it, with no supporting basis at all. The report proves absolutely nothing, and it’s entirely appropriate of me to say so.
Sorry about that. Forgot to close a tag. Should’ve used preview.
It bears repeating: Both Paul Krugman and Hilzoy should be ashamed to have relied on such a shoddy study. Neither one would cite this kind of unsubstantiated and non-scientific baloney in their own academic work (at least I hope not). Why is it good enough to use here?
I don’t see anything in that link to remotely substantiate the claim that it’s a “shoddy” study. All I see is a lot of rhetorical questions which don’t come close to explaining away the huge mathematical disparity. In fact, most of the column simply serves to suggest that the authors of the study could have examined a different question instead.
Shorter Michael Smerconish: “But-but-but they’re Democrats. Did you hear me? DEMOCRATS!!1 ‘Nuff said.”
(Earnestly quoting low-rent O’Reilly wannabes counts as a Fonzie moment in my books. Hey, look – Dan Rather dry-humping Jamil Hussein!)
Mattt,
While I am not going to dispute that characterization of Mr. Smerconish in general, is there anything in particular you have in mind?
Did I cite it as conclusive proof? No. Did I rely on it? No. Do I think it’s shoddy? Not enough to call its conclusions into question.
To repeat myself: if whoever was guest posting at Instapundit chose to characterize my post as being “about” the study, that’s his business. But the post was not about the study. It did not rely on the study. The study is not the point. It is ancillary to an ancillary point.
To clarify, my ‘shorter…’ referred to the portion of the linked column Smerconish inquires about the political leanings of one of the study’s authors; the parenthetical ‘Fonzie’ aside was me cryptically stating my opinion (via hypertext) that the thread had jumped the shark; the Hussein/Rather coital encounter was (again) a cryptic (if not crass) reference to Rathergate, Jamilgate, and other examples of instances where some on the right believe that dissecting a red herring counts as debunking.
I’m sorry you (apparently) feel my post not sufficiently wonkish, DTM. Next time I’ll try to include more footnotes (and perhaps a Foucault quote).
And now, I bid adieu.
All I see is a lot of rhetorical questions which don’t come close to explaining away the huge mathematical disparity.
Sigh. The authors apparently went out and did some Google searches and then threw together a chart of all the relevant results (or a cherry-picked selection of the results? Who knows). This is an absolutely shoddy methodology. Which means that there may NOT BE any “huge mathematical disparity” in the first place.
Why is it a shoddy methodology? Well, basics first:
1. Not all newspapers put their stories online in the first place. Particularly small-town newspapers.
2. Even when newspapers do put their stories online, it’s very rare to find news stories from 2001, 2002, 2003, etc., that are still available. By far, most news stories expire after a limited period of time.
3. Both 1 and 2 mean that the authors would have missed many news stories in any search of Google.
4. Beyond that, the authors’ reported searches turn up 126,000 results (“public corruption” and “elected”) and 223,000 results (“federal grand jury” and elected) respectively. How the heck did the authors winnow through these results, most of which are irrelevant? More importantly, how in the world would you come up with a non-bogus random sample from these search results?
5. Without a random sample (and so far no one has come up with ANY reason to believe that the sample is random), the study is meaningless. If you don’t understand this point, please return to Statistics 101.
Mattt,
The link is to his biography.
*Sigh*
John Doe alreadylinked to the Smerconish column I was referring to.
The bio was included because I assumed a lot of non-Philly folks (like myself) wouldn’t know Smerconish from Adam (eg, that he was an O’Reilly fill-in and Bernie Goldberg-approved, thus putting his objectivity into question.)
Apologies for the confusion.
Do I think it’s shoddy? Not enough to call its conclusions into question.
This is unbelievable. Cite for me any legitimate social science study that:
1) does not discuss its methodology at all;
2) does not even claim that its sample was random (outside of ethnographies that are admittedly focused on a single institution and don’t make claims about the nationwide proportion of something);
3) is apparently based on Google results that, as everyone knows, don’t give full coverage and cannot be used to create a random sample; and
4) doesn’t even bother to mention the possibility of controlling for other factors (which here would include greater Democratic dominance of large urban cities where the incentives for corruption are greater and the frequency of news coverage is also greater).
I’m pretty sure that you’ll never find any such thing. Compared to any serious social science study, this looks like the equivalent of the Sokal hoax.
But the post was not about the study. It did not rely on the study. The study is not the point. It is ancillary to an ancillary point.
Well, this double ancillary point struck me as quite a bit more serious than anything that has been said about the 8 fired USAs. I guess I have to repeat myself:
1. 8 fired USAs — troubling, at least in a few of the cases, but not obviously troubling in a few other cases, and in any event, very limited in scope.
2. 6 years of politicized prosecutions on a nationwide scope, either targetting innocent Democrats or failing to prosecute guilty Republicans — a much more significant problem, IF it’s true.
So Mattt, do I have this right:
1. Michael Smerconish has filled in for Bill O’Reilly on his radio show.
2. Therefore, when Smerconish reports that the study’s authors told him the specifics of their Google searches, he’s lying. And with amazing brazenness, too, given that the authors could easily point out that they did a different Google search or that they didn’t rely on Google at all.
3. Therefore . . . what? What are you trying to suggest? That the methodology is fine and peachy?
Reply to: Anarch’s comment| March 13, 2007 at 12:51 PM
You are right on about Mayor Xochilt Ruvalcaba not being a target of Bush’s DOJ investigation
1. The investigation was started by Cooley, LA District Atty prompted by the DEMOCRATIC LATINO CACUS as political retaliation for her opposition to their money cow “The Neava Azela Power Plant” – check the facts LA Weekly Sarah Catania exposes how Martha Escutia, Marco Firebaugh and the Dem Latino Cacus received large campaign contributions from The Power Plant’s owners SunLaw. In addition Martha’s husband Leo Briones was the project manager of the proposed power plant who btw made in excess of $150,000 for one year of service!
2. Xochilt Ruvalcaba was investigated throughly and came out crystal clean!
3. The checks that were signed before leaving office were for fees already incurred by attorneys and were due. Her council was being sued left and right and they had a responsibility to defend the city from frivolous lawsuits!
4. The employees that were laid off were student workers and community services department (established community clean ups, free tutoring and assistance in reporting potholes and sidewalk repairs, etc.)established by the Mayor Ruvalcaba. therfore the new council saw those employees as former allies of the outgoing council.
5. Has anyone driven by that city?!?! It is trashy! Mayor Ruvalcaba whas been out since 2003. you want to tell me that in 4 years the new council cannot manage to clean and repair public property!
You are so right it wasn’t Bush – BULLSHIT is definately bipartisian!!!!
F%$k the Dems as well!!!